


Desperation Deluge

by Signel_chan



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Detectives, F/M, Police, Rain, Sharing a Bed, Storms, Travel, famous people are out of touch, lots of missed connections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 60,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22671745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: Detective Shuichi Saihara is given the task to drive the famous pianist Kaede Akamatsu to her next concert, simply because he's going to investigate a crime in the same city where she needs to go; their trip doesn't go anywhere close to expected and picking up the pieces is nearly impossible when neither person really wants to open up to and understand the other.
Relationships: Akamatsu Kaede/Saihara Shuichi (onesided), Harukawa Maki/Momota Kaito (b-plot)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	1. Rainstorm

**Author's Note:**

> oh hey it's NaNo fic time!!  
> I sure do love callbacks to older fics of mine~

The road nestled against the small river was beautiful enough to see in pictures, but driving on it was a completely different experience, and it was one that Shuichi honestly wished he could be having in slightly better weather. There were raindrops hitting the windshield consistently, causing him to have to use the wipers just infrequently enough that he couldn’t set them to automatic and call it a day, lest he wanted to fill the car with the sound of screeching as the blade went dry across the glass. He would be the only one bothered by the sound, though, as his passenger was off in her own world, headphones in her ears and her eyes looking out at the river as they drove along it.

How he’d gotten roped into driving one of the most popular classical pianists in the country was rather simple, and it wasn’t as if he had any problems with her as a person, but he could have done for someone to at least engage with on the more boring parts of the trip. They’d been at it for several hours, coming up on the last small town before their destination, and he was growing lonely despite having a beautiful woman sitting right next to him. “Wonder if she would be acting like this if anyone else was the one driving her,” he asked himself, as he turned the wipers on for another go, noticing this time that the rain was beginning to pick up its pace. “She’s not even paying attention to the weather, she’s just…doing her own thing right now.”

“I can hear you, you know,” she replied, and for the first time the whole drive Shuichi could say that he heard Kaede say something in his direction, even if she was still focused on the world outside the window. “It’s just a lovely drive through here, and usually I don’t get to take it so slowly, so I was enjoying the view and the playback of my concert from last night. Is there a problem with that?”

He hadn’t expected to have to actually _talk_ to her about how he felt, and so he shook his head and swallowed down any other thoughts he may have had. She seemed content with his silence, and went to press play on her phone’s screen once more when they heard what sounded like a low rumble of thunder off in the distance. “Great, a thunderstorm, exactly what I want to be driving into when we’re about to get into the no man’s land part of this drive,” he grumbled, while Kaede’s eyes turned from the window over to him, an expression of curiosity upon her face. “I know that we’ve both got places to be tomorrow, but I’d rather stop than have to drive through the unknown during a storm.”

“If it wasn’t for the fact that my rehearsal at the next theater is in the morning, I’d agree with you, but I kinda need to get there tonight to make sure that happens.” Miming playing the piano with one hand while she returned to listening to her music, Kaede was pausing her song once again when a second rumble, much louder and closer, filled the air. It was followed by a brilliant strike of lightning seconds later, which made her jump and had Shuichi grabbing the wheel a bit tighter. “O-okay, maybe they’ll understand if I miss the first rehearsal if I tell them it was either stop for the night, or die in whatever kind of storm this is. You can totally stop if you’d like.”

Under his breath he muttered something about how he hadn’t been asking her for her permission, but Shuichi knew that picking a fight with Kaede wasn’t the smartest idea he could have in that moment. Until she was with the crew at the next venue she was playing at, she was entirely his problem to take care of, and if they weren’t on speaking terms it would make that job a million times more difficult than necessary. She was nice enough, if not a bit unaware of what life was like to not be someone famous and playing sold-out crowds at concert halls around the world as her day job, and from the moment they’d met he’d felt obligated to hold himself to the task he’d been given in protecting her. That moment, of course, had been earlier that day, after he’d been asked to drive her to her next destination because he had his own personal reasons to be headed that way.

Those reasons really weren’t “personal” so much as they were work-related, him needing to investigate a crime scene in the next major city over from his home of Kibou that reportedly matched the description to one that they’d been dealing with in town. Being a detective wasn’t the life that Shuichi wanted for himself, but it was the one he’d fallen into without any chance of getting out on his own, and with how many of his friends had followed him down in various ways, the choices for ways out were limited at best. “Say, Shuichi, are you going to stick around for my show once we get there?” Kaede asked, her voice less panicked than it had been when she last spoke. “Or are you going to stick to whatever’s got you making this drive in the first place and leave me in the dust?”

“No idea, depends on how this investigation goes, I suppose.” The truth was, Shuichi had zero intention of watching Kaede’s piano concert, not when he’d never heard of her up until a few days before when driving her had been brought up the first time. He wasn’t interested in the idea of wasting his time sitting around listening to her play songs from classical libraries he could look up on his own, not when he could be using that same time doing things relevant to his career field. If he could get the investigation over quickly, and get back on the road home within a handful of hours, he’d consider the whole trip successful without any second thought. Going to her show would only hinder his chances of making that happen, but he couldn’t tell her that outright without causing problems. “That, and how long it takes for us to get to town in the first place. Look at how hard this rain’s coming down.”

“Well, don’t forget that the offer’s on the table,” she replied after following his prompting and looking at the heavy raindrops that were now splashing against the windshield, leaving large rings of water in their wake. “And please don’t kill both of us driving in this. I can justify getting to rehearsals late, I can’t justify never getting there at all.” As she sank back down into her seat with her music playing in her ear once more, Shuichi shook his head at how poorly he felt that interaction had gone. Sure, he was just trying to make small talk with her to pass the time, at her insistence, but he still didn’t like when he was having to talk to someone who wasn’t actually interested in what he had to say.  
Unfortunately for him, most of the time he was talking to people who had zero interest or care about his words, because of his specific line of work. He was a detective, whether he had ever wanted to be one or not, and his specialty was handling some of the nastiest, most brutal domestic cases across the country (again, whether he wanted it or not). Usually he was reserved for when the dirt got too deep for the general police to sift through, but sometimes he was called upon for special tasks that he and he alone was entrusted with. Going to investigate a scene in a completely different city wasn’t his typical assignment, and that had been compounded when he’d been asked if he could take Kaede with him, to kill two birds with one stone and save everyone else a little time and energy.

He gave a soft sigh, turning up the frequency of the wiper blades as they were needing to work just about as hard as they could to keep his line of vision clear. In such a short amount of time the sky had gone pitch-black, the only light coming from headlights and the bursts of lightning he kept seeing on the horizon, and a picturesque drive had turned to harrowing and dangerous in the blink of an eye. This wasn’t an unfamiliar drive for him, as he’d gone to seminars and conferences in towns further down the road than even their destination was, but it was definitely a different experience when he couldn’t see the river as the road wound its way alongside it.

When the loudest rumble yet came to their ears, Kaede yanked her headphones out in surprise from how hard her hands jerked her phone, her looking around wildly while Shuichi attempted to keep his calm in the driver’s seat. Without thinking about what she was saying, she asked him “Did you hear that thunder?” only to laugh about it seconds later, breathless and slightly terrified. “Of course you did, there’s no way you didn’t. That was close, don’t you think?”

“It was close, but I don’t think it was thunder,” he said in return, carefully choosing the words he used to verbalize his thought. “If it was, we would’ve seen lightning too, right? But there wasn’t any, it was just that…loud noise, whatever it was.”

“Oh geez, you don’t think it’s something wrong with your car, do you?” Kaede was visibly tensing up, which was not doing Shuichi any favors as he could see her beginning to panic there in his passenger’s seat from the corner of his eye. “I already told you, I can justify being late, I can’t justify not showing up at all.”

He took in a sharp breath, holding it for a few moments before exhaling through his nose, trying to maintain his composure as he ran through all the possibilities of what they could have heard. “If it was the car, it wouldn’t have sounded so distant. I think we might’ve just missed seeing the lightning, because it wouldn’t make any sense for it to be anything else.” Feeling satisfied with that answer, he glanced towards her for a split-second and found her pouting, putting on a fine display of wanting to use her beauty as a tool to get him to do what she wanted. There was a moment’s hesitation as he grappled with the idea of falling for it, but he couldn’t risk her being right and there being something wrong with the vehicle he’d borrowed from work to get her to her destination. “When we get into the next town I’ll pull over and check, there’s bound to be somewhere covered where I can look and not be out in the rain. Then we can stop for the night.”

That appeased her, as the pout disappeared and was replaced with a helpful, if not somewhat smug, smile. “Let me look it up, I bet there’s somewhere right off the road in town that we can stop at, for both things. I can’t wait to stretch my legs, I know I’m used to sitting at the piano for hours but car trips just feel different.” She laughed, but he wasn’t able to bring himself to do the same, as he was focused solely on the road once again. They were so close to being able to be done with driving in the rain for the night that he was growing anxious for something being wrong with the car that would stop them before they were ready, and Shuichi was not exactly the best at warding off the problematic thoughts when things started getting tough.

Kaede’s search brought up that there was a gas station just across the next bridge they were coming up to, which found itself located in the middle of the small town. It was a lovely bridge for someone to park on top of and watch the river flowing gently beneath it, but in the storm it would be slick and hard to drive on, something that Shuichi cursed silently about. He’d been hoping that she’d say it was on the side of the river they were already on, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about making that crossing—except, as they came up into the town and saw nothing but flashing lights ahead on the road, he was greeted with the fact that his wish had come true after all.

While he could have turned the hidden lights on his own car on to get closer, he drove up to the last intersection before the bridge, where the direction he needed to go was blocked off by several officers, standing in reflective vests waving wands trying to redirect traffic even though it was pouring rain. “Uh, Shuichi?” Kaede said, timidity in her voice as she raised a hand to point past the officers, into the deep darkness. “Isn’t there supposed to be, you know, a bridge there?”

He blinked a couple times, trying to mentally process what it was she’d asked him, before it hit that she was correct and that the bridge in the center of town, the focal point that brought visitors to the streets for beautiful sights, seemed to be missing. “I’ll go see what’s going on,” he told her, turning down where he was being directed and parking the first chance he got, throwing on his jacket marking him as a member of a police force and opening the door. The sound of the rain hitting not just the car but the ground around them immediately began echoing in his ears, and he considered finding a different way to solve the mystery, but he was a _detective_. Solving things was part of his day job, he wasn’t going to resort to the internet to answer questions. “You stay right here, I’ll be back in a second.”

“In all that dark clothing? I think not!” Unbuckling herself so that she could get her decorative sweater off from around her shoulders, Kaede handed the flimsy, bright pink fabric over to him despite his concerned look. “It’s so dark out there that you’d just blend right in if you didn’t have this with you. I’ll wait here like you asked, but I don’t want you dying to see what’s happening.”

“Er, thank you for the concern,” he said as he gingerly grabbed the sweater, feeling that it had no weight to it and that it wouldn’t be helpful in the slightest if it was supposed to be used to block out the rain. Unsure of what else he should say, he got out of the car and closed the door, looking at Kaede inside and noticing that she had already gone back to listening to her music, her headphones back where they’d spent most of their trip so far.

Being physically out in the rain felt like an entirely different world than driving in it had been, but Shuichi wasn’t going to turn back without answers, no matter how bone-chillingly wet he got. He splashed through giant puddles as he ran towards where the police blockade was, his legs up to the knees soaked from the first one he’d stepped in with no sign of relief. As he made his approach, one of the officers standing there noticed that someone was coming towards them and turned to stand guard, one hand on his light wand and the other reaching for something on his belt. “Please, believe me when I say when I’m a detective,” Shuichi called out, raising his hands defensively in case a gun was drawn. “I’m just curious about what’s going on right now. Shouldn’t there be a bridge behind you?”

The officer’s position did not move, even as he demanded that Shuichi pull out his identification to prove he was as he claimed. He did it without even faltering slightly, not wanting to meet a grisly end when he still had a job to do, and once he was within reach of the officer he held the badge out so that it could be viewed. With a nod to accept the identification as legitimate, the officer explained, “How you didn’t hear the collapse is a miracle, Detective Saihara. It was about loud enough to raise the dead. River got higher than it’s ever been and knocked out a support beam, and the rest is history.”

“The bridge…collapsed?” Shuichi repeated, a crushing feeling coming over him, pushing onto his shoulders even as he worked to get his badge back into his wallet and into his pocket. “Shouldn’t it have been checked to make sure that couldn’t happen?” All he could think about was the booming noise he and Kaede had heard on their drive, and how that must have been the sound the officer spoke of. Of course there hadn’t been lightning, not when the source was a bridge giving out, not thunder.

“I mean, certainly, but when they’re checkin’ for that they aren’t checkin’ in a spot that shouldn’t get touched outside of a hundred-year-flood. They always prettied up the top of the bridge, but never bothered to update what was keepin’ it standing.” The officer shrugged, before giving Shuichi a long, slow once-over. “Where’re you tryin’ to get to, since I assume you’re headed somewhere if you’re out in this mess.”

Rather than explain that the place he needed to go was on the other side of the bridge and down the road another hour or so, Shuichi brushed off the question with a single shake of the head. “Doesn’t matter, I just wanted to see what was going on for myself. You be safe and have a good night, okay?” The officer thanked him for his kindness, but being polite was the thing farthest from Shuichi’s mind as he turned back towards the car. Explaining what he’d just learned to Kaede was not going to go over well, not when she so badly insisted on being present for as much as she could before her next performance, and he took the time to think about how he’d word the news as he ran back to the car.

As a stroke of luck, he didn’t have to do much explaining once he was back in his seat, the cold, wet feeling of his clothing becoming suffocating in the warm air inside the car. “I just got a call from my manager saying that the bridge is out here in town, is that true?” His silence gave her the answer she was dreading, even though he remained quiet only because he wasn’t sure he wanted to say anything at all. “We’ve got to go back and go a different way, I can’t miss all of my rehearsals! Come on, tell me that you know some back road to get us there, please? Oh, pretty please, just go and say it!”

“I’m sure I can think of something,” he admitted after several tense seconds in which she was vibrating quickly enough that it was rocking the car (although the wind that had begun picking up in the storm may have helped her in that endeavor slightly). “But we’re stopping for the night here anyway, so let’s check out the hotels here on this side of town and see if anyone’s got anywhere we can stay. I’m not driving in this any longer than I need to, it’s brutal out there.”

“You’re the one driving, I guess you make the rules.” Huffing as she properly removed her headphones to listen to the rain falling around them, Kaede didn’t say another word to Shuichi until they had pulled up in front of the first hotel they’d seen coming into town, a quaint little chain location that seemed rather busy. He parked the car in the closest spot he could to the lobby door and looked at her with a frown, prompting her to say, “Is there something on my face? What’s that look for?”

He opened his mouth to say something, then shook it from his mind without ever bringing it to light. “Nothing, I’m going to go in and get rooms for both of us, you just stay here until I’m back.” His hand was on the door handle when she jolted forward in her seat, grabbing her own handle and pushing her door open before he had the chance to open his own. “Excuse me, didn’t I just say you stay here?”’

“You did, but my legs are cramping really bad and I just need to get up and walk. There’s no harm in me going in with you, I’ll get wet but it’s just water.” Truer words were never spoken, although as they walked to the door in silence Kaede seemed to regret her choice to come with a little more each step. By the time they got inside they were both drenched (even though Shuichi hadn’t quite dried in the first place), and once the automatic doors had closed behind them they saw that the man behind the front desk was staring slack-jawed at the pair, a finger pointing specifically at her. “Hello? Why are you pointing at me?”

“You’re Kaede Akamatsu, the pianist, aren’t you?” he asked, his voice high-pitched and making him sound like he was a teenage boy, not the man he physically presented as. When she nodded excitedly, happy to be recognized, he bounced a bit where he stood, before slamming something into his computer. “Ah, you’re just in time, we’re about booked due to the bridge collapse and people being stranded but I can get you a room, easy peasy.”

“You hear that,” she whispered to Shuichi with a smile, “he says he can get us a room, and it’s because he recognizes _me_.”

“Notice he said a singular room, meaning you’re sharing space with a stranger even longer than you already were,” Shuichi shot back, in an even quieter whisper than Kaede’s had been. “Bet you’re thrilled with that, huh?”

Before she had a chance to come up with her own response, the man at the desk clasped his hands excitedly, before waving for the two to come closer. “Okay, so all we have left is a single room, double bed, nothing fancy for the famous woman but a room’s a room, right?”

“Ooh, double bed, that’s exactly what we—”

“Excuse us one moment.” Understanding that it was completely likely that Kaede hadn’t been present when a hotel room was being booked for a long time, if ever, Shuichi would have looked past her ignorance on the matter if it weren’t for one pressing issue that had showed up. He motioned for her to come aside with him, which she did without thinking twice about it, and while the man at the desk watched them he leaned in closer to Kaede than he’d thought he’d be getting that night and asked her, “You know that means one bed, correct? As in, we will be sharing a bed?”

While he pulled back Kaede’s face contorted in several ways as she worked through the information her detective companion had just bestowed upon her. First she squished her eyes closed, her cheeks rising up to keep them tightly shut, then she slowly opened them and glanced around, checking to see if she was still in the same world she’d been in when she’d closed them. Her cheeks puffed out and she started to give a low whine, getting louder as she looked at Shuichi and saw him staring blankly back at her. “You mean to tell me the kid recognized me and he’s still going to make me share a bed with a stranger?”

“I’m sure he’s doing all he can. Look, I’m not thrilled with the idea either but if we’re staying here, we’re having to take what he’s got.” It was tough being the sensible one in a situation, but it was a role that Shuichi was all-too-familiar with as he played it frequently with the people he worked with. Playing it with Kaede was no different than with them, and so he tried his best to maintain seriousness and calmness while she was freaking out. “I’d rather not have to share a bed with you either, but at least it would be for one night only.”

“That’s true, but…” Kaede took in several deep breaths, trying to calm herself down to match emotions with who she was speaking with, but before she’d really gotten any calmer than she currently was she was running back to the desk where the man was waiting for them to accept the room or not. “Listen to me, do you have anywhere else we can stay? That guy I’m with, he’s just the detective that’s taking me to my next show, he’s not my boyfriend or anything, I can’t risk being caught sharing a bed with him!”

“Sorry Miss Akamatsu, but all I’ve got is that one double room. We’re the only hotel on this side of the bridge, and since you can’t exactly cross it right now it’s either stay here, or get back on the road until you get to the next town down the highway.” The man shrugged, jiggling his mouse to keep the potential booking open. “I can give you two minutes before I offer this room to the next person who asks for it, if you want to talk to him.”

She nodded, and turned to go back to Shuichi but saw that he’d come back to her side once again without a sound, giving her a bit of a fright when he was suddenly there. “I heard what you said, and I’m not risking my life or hers to go find another hotel to stay in,” Shuichi said, his voice beginning to raise in pitch as nerves began taking over his mind. He hadn’t expected to be faced with the possibility of sharing a bed with a strange woman that day, not when he’d had a reservation made for him in a hotel room at his intended destination. “Do you have any rolling beds, or maybe a couch that can be moved into the room? I’m even fine with sleeping on the floor.”

“We’re dry on all of that, sorry to say. If you want, I can maybe scrounge up an extra pillow or two, but that would be it.” He may have looked apologetic as he spoke, but every word the man was saying did not feel like it had genuine intentions with it. “This bridge collapse is a bit of a nightmare for so many, you’re lucky that we still had a single room open, even if it isn’t what you’re looking for.”

“No, I get it, I really do. This is just…difficult to take in.” On one hand, Shuichi knew that if he took it slow and carefully, he could make the drive back down the highway and get to another town where they could possibly find somewhere better to stay. On the other, there was zero guarantee that the next town would have lodging either, and it was preferred that they didn’t have to risk their lives in the storm to get anywhere. “I suppose we can make it work if we need to.”

“Um, yeah, I suppose we can,” Kaede agreed, surprise in her voice as she spoke. “I’m gonna go call my manager to let her know what’s going on. You handle paying for this however you’re gonna do it, Shuichi.” She gave him an awkward pat on the shoulder before she walked away, leaving Shuichi standing face-to-face with the man at the counter, whose eyes were following Kaede’s every step.

“How lucky to be her personal driver tonight of all nights,” the man remarked, before holding out his hand and presenting the total for staying at the hotel for the night. “I don’t know what I’d do in your situation, sharing a bed with a pretty lady is one thing, but sharing a bed with Kaede Akamatsu is another, I’m sure.”

Grumbling under his breath as he handed his work-assigned card over, Shuichi replied, “You’d think that, but you haven’t been stuck in a car with her in all of this.” He knew for a fact that the man heard what he said, and based on how their conversation ended right there, the only exchange following being saying where their room was and how to get there, he could tell that he’d offended him somehow. Once he had the key to their room and his card back in his wallet, Shuichi found a seat on a bench right by the counter to wait for Kaede to come back, just in case she cared.

While he was sitting there, he couldn’t help but start thinking about how this relatively simple task had gone complete haywire so close into being finished in the first place. He had places he needed to be the next day, just like Kaede did, and he felt that what he was going to be late to was a tad more important than what she was going to be missing. There was always time for more practicing the piano; there were only so many hours that a fluid crime situation could be investigated before it changed. This was a crime spree that multiple forces had been working on for months, and they were starting to make progress on solving things, but if he couldn’t get there to look at the scene before something happened to it, it was completely possible that their investigation would meet its untimely end.

“Hey, what’s with the long face?” Kaede asked, making him jump back a little as he looked to see her smiling down at him. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, now tell me why you look so sad. It’s almost like you got told your dad’s dying or something.”

“That wouldn’t make me sad so much as it would be a relief,” he answered, before realizing how harsh that sounded to someone who wasn’t familiar with his particular family situation and how he’d lived with his uncle for most of his life because his parents were always too busy for him. “Er, I mean, I look so sad because we were really thinking that doing this was going to solve the mystery that we’ve been fighting for so long, but all it’s done is lead us to this hotel where we’re going to be sharing a room without really knowing each other. It’s a lot to take in at once, and I’m not the best at working through how I feel.”

She watched him as he pulled his hat down slightly over his eyes, blocking her from being able to see too much more of his emotions, but she wasn’t going to continue letting him close himself off from her and from the world. “Listen here, Shuichi, I know that this is the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to us, but let’s look at the positives! We aren’t dead, the bridge fell before we got to it so that’s fantastic because it didn’t hurt us, and now we get to get to know each other a bit better than we would have otherwise!” She grabbed his shoulder and smiled at him, and there was something about her tone, or how she was looking down at him, that took him by surprise.

His immediate reaction was to start blushing, his face lighting up like a brilliant sunrise, and she had to refrain from laughing at how childish his behavior was. “I know you’re right, and it’ll be nice knowing that we didn’t die together, but I don’t want to be here. I want to get to the hotel I arranged to stay in, in the bed meant for me and only me, and sleep there.”

“Then that’s your thing and you can sleep on the floor tonight.” Her hand on his shoulder closed into a fist, and she banged it against him a few times before pulling it away. “So what decision are you making, Shuichi? Be positive, or be negative? Totally up to you.”

“That’s a lot to just put on me at once,” he replied, giving her ultimatum some thought before heaving a sigh, “but the man already said there’s no extra blankets and I’m not going to sleep on a bare floor. Let’s go find this room so I can bring our things into it.” She nodded in acceptance of his choice and backed away to give him the space necessary to stand up, and once he was to his feet they went to find the closest set of stairs to the lobby, which was a much shorter walk than finding the elevator up would have been, and more efficient as their room was on the next floor. They found their room at the end of the hallway, the last room before the other set of stairs that would take them down to roughly right where Shuichi had parked the car in the first place.

It was the little conveniences that mattered right then, when the whole situation was a major inconvenience to them both, and when they opened the door and Kaede went into the room first (as it was polite for a lady to do so), the part about some things going in their favor went right out the window. “He wasn’t joking when he said there was only one bed, but I wasn’t expecting something so…small,” she admitted, holding her arms out to roughly estimate how big across the bed was. “I’m not exactly the calmest sleeper, sometimes I’ll thrash around and this might get ugly. Sorry about that, Shuichi.”

Already having come to terms with the fact that he was going to be labeled some famous musician’s illicit lover if the fact that they were rooming together came out, Shuichi didn’t seem bothered at all by her revelation. “No matter, if I get to the crime scene tomorrow with a black eye, I’ll just say something hit me in the car and leave you out of it entirely.” He was also looking at the relatively tiny size of the bed, equating it with the one he had back in his apartment at home, and of the many times he’d had someone else sleeping in the bed with him—which were few and far between, but had happened on long nights filled with work—he couldn’t recall there ever being a time where he’d actively wanted the person sleeping next to him to be there.

What, then, was making the fact that he was sharing that same size of bed with Kaede any different? It was a question he asked himself not out of curiosity but rather dread, as he knew that this was going to look bad on her if it ever became public, and he’d never hear the end of it with some of his coworkers. “Why do you look so sad again?” Kaede’s voice questioned from across the room, where she’d taken a seat in the desk chair that went with the room’s only other piece of furniture, the desk nestled in the corner. “You’re not missing a hot date tonight, are you?”

“As if anyone would be interested in that kind of emotional baggage,” he answered, once again realizing too late that he was dumping a lot of his own problems on a stranger that didn’t actually care a thing about him. “No, I was just thinking about how similar to my apartment this room is. You’re the only thing that’s really different between here and there, as strange as that may seem.”

“Doesn’t seem strange at all. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to sleep at my house that I kind of can’t even compare this place to it. I know it’s way bigger, and my bed is super huge and looks way more comfy, but I…don’t really remember much else off the top of my head.” Spinning herself around in the chair a couple times, Kaede’s eyes landed on the television that was attached to the wall, and from there she began to look for a remote to control it with. “I’m going to check the weather, see how bad this storm is,” she told him, “so you can totally take this time to go get our things. I’ll still be here, I promise.”

Holding his tongue until he’d left the room without being able to say another word to her, the second Shuichi was halfway down the stairs next to the room he let out, “If only you wouldn’t still be there when I get back,” before immediately regretting the bitterness. He was being irrational and stupid about how he felt in this situation, they were making the best of the horrible circumstances they’d fallen into and if it meant sharing a bed with her like he’d shared a bed with so many others, it wasn’t the end of the world. She’d said it best before when she’d said they weren’t dead or injured, they weren’t on the bridge when it collapsed, and they were going to be able to get to know each other and become less of strangers than they currently were. “I don’t do well with meeting new people,” he muttered, trying so hard to think about those positives that Kaede had handed him on a silver platter but feeling like all he’d done was knock the tray onto the floor. “Especially not entitled musicians who don’t understand how the world works.”

When he got to the bottom of the stairs and was able to look out at the rainy parking lot, spotting his car across the way and dreading running out to get things from it, he considered turning around and going back without making any sort of attempt, but pushed that aside when he remembered how uncomfortable sitting in the car had been for both of them. He was half-dressed in his work uniform, his black shirt tucked into his pants like he always had it, and she’d been in a dress that nearly skimmed the ground. Certainly sleeping in their underwear was not an option, nor was staying in what they were wearing, so the least he could do was grab things for them to change into.

He made sure that his keys were in his hand as he opened the door, charging out into the steadily-falling rain that had only gotten heavier in the time they’d been indoors. Every step he took caused a large splash that was not helping any bit of him stay dry, the parking lot more like a giant puddle than anything else, and by the time he’d gotten to the trunk of the car and was pulling out everything he could carry he was soaked again from head to toe. Deciding that the first course of action when he got back up to the room would be to take a warm shower, Shuichi filled his arms with just about everything the car had to offer before closing the trunk, locking the car again, and running back to the door.

All of Kaede’s belongings dwarfed his in both number and size, as his one bag fit easily on his back while everything he’d grabbed of hers filled his arms and made it harder to see in an already-difficult situation, but he was able to get back inside without dropping anything into the water. The top bags were all damp from the rain but he figured they’d be able to dry out in the room, and back up the stairs he went, finding the door to their room cracked open slightly when he got there. “Why did you prop it open?” he asked as he pushed his way inside, finding that the deadbolt was activated so that it couldn’t properly lock, and Kaede didn’t turn to answer his question.

While he was setting things down, he heard snippets of the weather report she’d found, the very thing that had her attention glued to it. The reporter on screen sounded frantic, and Shuichi recognized them to be from the local news he listened to every night, a familiar voice in such a strange situation; the franticness became apparent when she started explaining what was happening in the areas north and west of the city of Kibou, which was roughly where they were at the moment. “An unprecedented storm of the century, if not the millennium, has taken hold and some towns and cities will wake up to find everything they love under meters of water, with the rain not letting up for several days. People are stranded out there, due to bridge collapses and road wash-outs, and if you don’t need to be out, please stay home!”

“It’s not that bad out there,” Shuichi remarked, going through his bag to find a pair of lounge pants to change into once he finished his shower. “A bit of rain, but by morning it’ll be fine to drive in it. We’ll get to the city tomorrow afternoon and it’ll be like none of this ever happened to us.”

He thought he was being realistic, but as Kaede turned around slowly in the desk chair, a solemn expression upon her face, he began rethinking that concept. “She said it right before you came inside, residents in this town are effectively stuck right where they are. When we heard that loud noise, it wasn’t the bridge, Shuichi.”

“Wasn’t the bridge? What was it then, thunder after all?”

“It was the road washing out a few kilometers from where we were. If we’d turned around we wouldn’t have been able to make it home.” There was a grave seriousness to Kaede’s voice, and adding in her expression only made it more impossible to question the validity of what she said. “We’re stuck here until either they fix the road, they fix the bridge, or they transport us out some other way, and they can’t do any of that until the storm stops, _and_ they have no idea how long it’s going to be raining for.”

Shuichi’s mouth opened and he looked past Kaede to see the television screen, which was showing pictures of destruction and flooding from another nearby town along the river, and the sight of the water coming up over those picturesque banks made him snap his jaw shut immediately. She was telling him the truth, they weren’t getting to where they needed to go and there was nothing he could do about it. There was nothing she could do about it either, despite her reliance on her fame to get other things taken care for her. They were trapped there in that hotel and the area surrounding it (although how much there was to do outside of the building, he didn’t know, he’d never stopped on that side of town before), and all they could do was wait for something to go in their favor.

Finally, after what felt like several tense minutes of him going over all of this information mentally, he had his pants and a dry shirt in hand and headed to the small bathroom their room had. “I’m taking a shower, please don’t walk in on me,” he said, but Kaede had gotten engrossed in watching the news and weather again and didn’t hear him. The second he’d closed the door to the bathroom he sniffled, feeling an unwanted bout of emotion coming over him, but he swallowed down his sobs and got his phone out of his pocket, a half-broken flip phone that had been assigned to him from work. Without needing to look at anything on the cracked screen he pressed and held a single button, waited for it to beep, and then held the phone to his ear.

It rang and rang, and then went to the voicemail of his office, the person who should have been in charge of the phones for the day either having left work early or having gotten called out somewhere else. There was no point in leaving a message if they weren’t there to get it, so he hung up, set the phone down, and turned the water on for his shower. If he was lucky, he’d come out to the message that everything was a huge practical joke and that he’d be able to get to the city tomorrow as he’d hope. And if he wasn’t lucky…well, he knew what his fate would be in that instance, and there wasn’t a single good thing he could think of that could possibly come from that.

* * *

Typically there was at least one detective around the station at all times, usually Shuichi because he was the one that was effectively in charge of that location, but sometimes it was his uncle stepping in to help his nephew out, and other times it was Kyoko Kirigiri from the head office making sure that things were still running smoothly. That particular day, and the weekend to follow it, was planned to be different than usual, starting with the fact that for four whole days there wouldn’t be any detectives that could be called on to handle investigating any potential crimes. There would, however, be the special task force that worked at that station who could do some arresting, some scouting, and some minor patrolling if necessary, but even then their involvement would be limited because the station’s receptionist was gone for the weekend as well, and as he and the two normal detectives that worked there (not including the elder Saihara) were the only ones who had keys to the holding cell in the building.

Looking at her reflection in the picture frame that held an image of the employees at the station that hung behind the front desk, Maki rolled her eyes when she heard what she knew to be someone knocking something over in the back office. “You break anything, you explain to Shuichi and Kyoko why we’re suddenly over budget because we’re replacing valuables,” she called to the person responsible for the noise, who chuckled ominously in return. “I’m being serious, Kokichi. Knock it off.”

“He never listens when you’re being serious,” the third member of their tiny task force said in response not to Kokichi’s laughter, but to Maki’s words. “It’s kind of a pain having to listen to you when I’m not the one doing anything wrong.”

“No one ever said you had to listen to me right now, Himiko, so there’s that,” Maki replied, turning her head to look backwards over her shoulder at the tiny woman she was speaking to, who yawned in return. “Go find something else to do if I’m annoying you that much, I don’t have the patience to deal with you both. As the person currently in charge of the station I—”

“Who said _you_ were in charge?” Coming out of the office with a few books in his arms, Kokichi had a toothy grin upon his face that didn’t budge even when Maki shot him a deadly glare. “Oh, right, forgot that you think you’re special just because you’re actually friends with certain people. Or should I say bed-buddies with one of them, eh, Maki Roll?”

“Don’t you ever call me that,” she sneered, lunging at him with a balled fist but never taking a swing while he cackled at her, “and none of that’s even true. Shuichi told me that he had to put the responsible person in charge while he’s gone taking care of his investigation, and clearly he wasn’t talking about either of you.” A pause while she glanced at Himiko, who was once again mid-yawn. “No offense to you, of course, but all the offense to the rat who’s going through our boss’ office looking for things to nick.”

Kokichi’s grin opened up into a smug, thrilled smile as he replied, “No, Maki, I’m not trying to steal anything of his, I’m trying to see what kind of cool stuff he’s got hidden in there! So far I’ve found books on blood splatter and on legal documents, but that’s all lame compared to what I know he’s got to have. Don’t you think there’s got to be some really cool shit in there, like maybe a gun or a book on how to get away with killing someone?”

“That’s stupid, Shuichi would never have anything like that in his office. He tries to follow the law all of the time, unlike…” Maki trailed off as she looked to Himiko again, easily the purest person she’d ever met in her life, before her eyes wandered to Kokichi and his dumb face. “Unlike the two of us. But even though I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have, I’m still more responsible here than you are.”

“Fair point, at least you won’t prank call people for the thrill.” Shrugging, Kokichi walked to the bench where Himiko had taken a seat and sat down next to her, handing off one of the books to her. “Here, let’s read up and see if maybe we can get promoted to something higher than Maki when everyone gets back. I’d lo-o-ove to see her face when she realizes she can’t boss us around anymore.”

Shaking her head in annoyance at how immature Kokichi was, Maki went back to looking at her reflection in the picture frame, before taking a seat in the low chair that was behind the front desk. It made sense that it was so low to the ground, seeing as their receptionist was quite tall, but for someone as short as her it made reaching the things on the desk a bit harder than they needed to be. She looked at the small collection of knick-knacks and garbage that had been collected, pictures of stars and planets lining the sides of the computer used to research crimes and locations, and she could feel something building up inside her as she saw a picture of the receptionist and his grandparents tucked next to the phone. “Damn it, why do you have to be gone this weekend too?” she grumbled, flipping the picture down so that she didn’t have to look at it again. “Leaving me with these two when I could be stuck dealing with your stupid ass instead, I’ll never forgive you for this.”

In her focus on removing that distraction, she hadn’t even noticed that Kokichi had gotten bored of looking through his books and had set them down next to Himiko, stood up, and come to stand right in front of the desk. Her rude awakening came when he frantically began slamming his hand down on the bell that visitors used to get someone’s attention, and the jolt from hearing that loud ring the first time was almost enough to get her to jump to her feet and strangle the person responsible. “Are you missing your work boyfriend?” he teasingly asked when he caught sight of her angered eyes pointed towards him. “Ooh, you know what? I bet he doesn’t miss you at all. Someone tall, dark, and handsome like him? I bet he’s got ladies all over him right now.”

“One, I don’t have a work boyfriend, and two, sounds like you’re describing Shuichi more than you’re describing…ugh, never mind, don’t make me say that.” Maki so badly wanted to attack Kokichi in that moment, much like so many other moments before it, but she knew that retaliating against him would only land her in hot water with everyone else. “And three, we both know that the person you’re talking about is probably fast asleep at home, not out getting swarmed by ladies who think he’s hot before they realize how dumb he is.”

“Aw, sounds like someone’s getting a little flustered just talking about their big ol’ crush, huh, Maki?” Kokichi tapped his fingertips together quickly, cackling as he did, and his behavior did not do any favors to appease her murderous desires. “What a shame that you’re incapable of love, and that no one would be stupid enough to try dating you.”

“That’s it, I’m not putting up with this. As your _superior_ —”

Kokichi cut off her attempted threat with the loudest cackle he’d had yet. “Superior what? Pain in my ass? You’ve got no real power over me, only Shumai and Kyoko do and you don’t see either of them here. You’re stuck with me exactly as I am, deal with it.”

“—disgusting, you’re calling him a nickname now.” Getting up from behind the desk, Maki decided that she was simply going to be done with dealing with Kokichi’s nonsense and headed towards Shuichi’s office, which she knew had been ransacked and needed to be straightened up. When she heard footsteps trailing behind her she turned around, shaking a fist in Kokichi’s direction to get him to stop. “Leave me alone for five damn minutes, will you?” she demanded, not ceasing her shaking until he’d backed off, promising he’d give her exactly that much time, and she could believe him when she didn’t hear him resume following her. Stepping into the office when the man who usually was there was gone for the weekend was a bit strange, especially since his usual stand-in was also gone, but Maki knew that she was allowed to be there, and definitely had more right to be there than the person who’d been digging around did.

Immediately she could tell that Kokichi had been looking for things that weren’t the books he’d removed from the room, as it wasn’t just the bookshelf that was in complete disarray. It was almost nightmare-ish how much damage had been inflicted on the normally clean office in such a short amount of time, but as Maki began putting things back where she remembered them being she realized that perhaps the mess hadn’t been all Kokichi’s doing in the first place. There were a large number of files related to the big case that Shuichi was currently working on scattered on his desk, and she knew that Kokichi had zero interest in helping solve that matter, so he wouldn’t have been pulling those out for any reason. The files on the criminal organization that he used to work for, however, were obviously out because he was checking in on them, and seeing the files on DICE made her wish that she could pull out files on her own background and check on what those people were up to.

Every day she was able to come into work as a specialized member of the police, without actually having been through the academy or any of the training that other officers were expected to go through, was a bit of a blessing in Maki’s mind. Having been raised and trained as an assassin for the longest time, it was nothing short of a miracle that she had been able to slip into a different line of work that relied on some of the same skills without the stigma or the active criminal behavior. She excelled in sneaking into places and getting stealth information on people they were investigating without being caught, and if needed she was capable of subduing anyone that got a bit rowdy, and that was what had made Shuichi put in the effort to have her on his team.

Kokichi and Himiko had their own merits as well, but neither of them had the actual, legitimate background in the criminal underbelly of Kibou that Maki had, and that was why she was seen as the “leader” of their little task force. Sure, Kokichi had his involvement with DICE but they’d been responsible for petty crimes at their worst, and he was better for being obnoxious and getting people to admit to things out of annoyance than anything else. On the other hand, Himiko’s one talent was her babyface and the fact that anyone she was sent to talk to could be tricked into falling for her innocence—or her pseudo-magic tricks that she was able to use to restrain people if needed. Maki could recall several instances where she’d walked into a scene with Himiko locking someone in a box under the guise of a magic trick, completely harmless yet entirely helpful.

“Maki! It’s been five minutes, I’m coming in now!” Kokichi called out, snapping Maki out of her thoughts and making her realize she hadn’t cleaned much of anything in the time she’d been daydreaming about her qualifications over the other two. She couldn’t even fact-check to see if Kokichi was telling the truth about how long she’d been in there, but there was no stopping him even if he was lying. “Geez, what a mess in here! I can’t believe you’d do this to Shumai’s office when he’s not around, what’s he going to think once he’s back?”

“He’s going to think you’re annoying because you’ve given him that nickname,” she replied without any consideration to holding her tongue or toning down the harshness. “I don’t know how he can stand having you around when you like clinging to him like a dog, I’d get tired of it in a heartbeat.”

“How unfortunate that you don’t have a heart then, huh?” Cackling when he saw that Maki was once again shooting him with her dagger-eyes, Kokichi put a finger to his cheek and smiled as big as he could. “I’m just playing with you, Maki Roll! I know you’ve got a heart in there, and I know who it beats for!”

She exhaled a long, deep breath to keep herself from losing her mind over how circular these conversations were getting with Kokichi. “I’ve told you before and I am not telling you again, you do not have permission to call me that name. It’s not your name for me, you don’t get to say it.”

“Aw, and that’s because it makes your cold, dead heart actually beat, I know.” His voice intentionally grating as he spoke in a sing-song, it took every ounce of strength Maki had to not slam Kokichi into the wall for his behavior. “I guess I’ll stop calling you it, have to save some of its energy for the person who normally uses it. I’ll come up with a better name for you anyway, just you wait!”

“Do it and I’ll kill you,” she deadpanned, watching as he turned on his toes and ran out of the office laughing to himself, most likely to annoy Himiko like he tended to do. While she could have chased him down and given him orders to do something productive for once, she couldn’t be bothered to actually care what he did as long as it wasn’t anything to do with her, and so she went back to reorganizing Shuichi’s office to undo the damage Kokichi had previously done to it. While she was in there, being careful not to touch anything related to his active case, she found herself finding an awful lot of pictures of their little team, which she didn’t know existed, and the sight of all of them made her cringe.

They were a rag-tag bunch through and through, and it didn’t matter how many times she was told that they were all there for a reason, because she would constantly doubt how effective any of them really were at their jobs. Shuichi was a decent enough detective, even though his cases were always rather simple and straightforward, and Maki liked when Kyoko was actively working with them because that was when she was able to help with restraining murderers and put her assassin training to good use. Kokichi and Himiko did their own thing most of the time, which didn’t bother her any as long as they weren’t sabotaging what she was doing. And then there was their receptionist, who only had his job because Shuichi knew that they needed someone to sit up front and take calls, and because he wasn’t going to leave a friend out to dry.

Seeing that stupid face smiling in every picture made her put them away as fast as she could, because while Maki could handle a lot of things, dealing with the fact that she was kinda-sorta attracted to someone she worked with was not one of them. “Hey, Kokichi just ordered a pizza using the work phone,” Himiko said in her dull monotone voice, breaking Maki’s concentration from frantically removing pictures from her sight. “I’m pretty sure we’ve been told not to do that, so you should go talk to him about it.”

Maki knew without a single doubt that Kokichi was acting the way he was simply to get some sort of reaction out of her, and she knew that if she took the bait she’d only cause more problems for herself. “That’s good for him, he can pay for it himself because that’s none of my business. Go tell him I said that, he’ll get a kick out of it.”

“I don’t think I want to tell him that.” Blinking slowly as she looked around the office, Himiko eventually decided to properly come inside and sat down in Shuichi’s chair, putting her arms on top of the files on his desk and laying her head down on them. “This is all so silly that we’re here, can I please go home so I can nap? We aren’t even doing any work today, and I have things happening tonight.”

“You, having things going on? Like what?” It was hard for Maki to feign any interest in whatever Himiko had to say, but at least she could pretend better with her than she could with Kokichi. “Is it going to a magic show? Putting on a magic show? What could there possibly be that you have to do?”

“Stuff and things,” Himiko replied, her tone not changing even slightly. “I’m going to a demonstration of some aikido stuff because Tenko asked me to, and I don’t know what else is going to happen after that. So I want to take a nap before I go.”

“You’ll be able to nap during the demonstration, don’t worry.” Maki wasn’t super familiar with what, exactly, that sort of thing would entail, but she did know that if it was anything to do with the loud, brash, and aggressive Tenko and her love of martial arts, it was going to be boring because she always toned down her behavior when she was doing something for a crowd. “Right now you can stay here and help me keep Kokichi’s hands out of places they don’t need to be.”

Giving a small, defeated sigh, Himiko lifted her head off of her arms and looked straight at Maki, boredom apparent across her face. “I guess I can do that, it’s probably better than napping is anyway.”

“Probably, sure.” Already over the conversation and wishing she could have let her leave for the day, Maki returned to her attempt at cleaning the office, but grew tired of it minutes later when she figured that she was just doing work Shuichi had put off in the first place. It didn’t seem possible that Kokichi had done so much damage in the short amount of time he’d been loose in there, and so she decided that she was finished with the task no matter what. Without giving any warning she left the office to go look around the rest of the small station, taking a mental inventory of what was done, what needed work, and what there was that she could set Kokichi to do in order to keep him out of trouble.

Her tallying took her to the holding cell in the building, which was used only when they were bringing criminals in for investigation before they were properly arrested or released, depending on what the findings were. She’d spent enough time in similar cells to know that she hated the confinement and that she would rather never step inside one again, but it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, despite that being a weekly expectation. It was a perfect job to shove into Kokichi’s hands, and so once she’d finished getting a feel for everything that needed to happen at the station she went to go find him, locating him lounging around on the floor in the main room.

“What’s going on?” he asked her when he saw that she was hovering above him, looking cross as she usually did. “Someone break in and impale themselves on some glass? Why else would you be wearing such a nasty expression?”

“It’s just my face,” she reminded him, motioning for him to get to his feet. When he followed through with the demand she immediately grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him much closer to her than she’d ever really wanted him to be. “I need you to go into the cell and clean it out, since it’ll make you work and get you out of my hair for a little while. Do it, or I’m calling Shuichi and telling him what you did to his office.”

“But Maki, I didn’t do a-a-anything!” His protesting was whiny and falling on deaf ears, and after she’d repeated her demand again he pulled himself out of her grasp, kicking his feet and stomping on the floor much like a child, before knocking off the whole act when he saw that she was not wavering on her stance. “Whatever, I guess I can get it done. It’s only a little bit of cleaning, how hard can it be?”

Apparently it was very hard, as Maki had just settled in at the front desk with the computer booting up in front of her when she heard Kokichi scream out in what sounded like terror. The sound was enough to get her to jump to her feet, confused about what was happening but worried that something had gone wrong, and as she went to find where he’d found trouble she saw Himiko’s half-lidded eyes peering around the doorway to Shuichi’s office, her having fallen asleep in there despite being told she couldn’t take a nap. They exchanged a worried, yet not too concerned glance before Maki continued on her way, coming to the cell with the door wide open and the bed that was inside flipped over. “Damn it Kokichi, how’d you manage this one?” she grumbled to herself, noticing that she couldn’t see him anywhere and expecting to find him crushed under the weight of the bed.

It wasn’t until she was inside the cell that she heard his cackling coming from back outside, but by the time it had registered that he wasn’t smashed under the bed like she’d assumed he had slid the door closed, and they both heard it latch with a loud, solid click. “Oh, I didn’t know you went in there,” he lied, trying his hardest to restrain himself from laughing too much. “I thought you didn’t care that I dropped the bed, oops.”

“Why did that make you think you needed to close the door?” she snapped back, ignoring the toppled metal frame and barely-a-mattress that sat on top of it to go check the door, which was unable to be opened from her side. “You’re an asshole, thinking you can just lock me in here like this. Open it, now.”

“With what key?”

“With what… _oh_.” It hadn’t even occurred to Maki that none of them there currently had a key to the cell, because none of them were supposed to be closing the door in the first place. Shuichi had a copy of the key, as did Kyoko due to her position of overseer of the station, and the only other person who had one was their receptionist, whose possession of one was constantly questioned and criticized. “Kokichi, if this is your stupid way of forcing me to beg for him to help me, you’re wrong.”

Tilting his head to one side and putting a finger to his chin, Kokichi began wearing a look of complete surprise at what he’d just been accused of. “I don’t get it, who do you think I’m going to make you beg for help from? Shuichi’s gone for the weekend and I wouldn’t ever ask Kyoko for anything, so…right! You’re talking about Kaito, aren’t you?” The glare she put on at him would have been enough to murder him on the spot if she were on his side of the cell’s door, and that was the breaking point for his laughter. “Wow, you must really think I care about your dumb crush on him if you think I’d try that kind of thing! But seriously, he doesn’t have a key anymore, you can’t ask him for help.”

“What happened to his key?” Half the time Maki had no idea if Kokichi was telling her the truth or if he was choosing to lie to her face, and this instance was no exception. “We all know that there are three keys, and he’s got the third one. So if he doesn’t have it, where did it go?”

“That’s the thing, he doesn’t have it because I took it.” His finger still pressed to his chin, even though he was laughing off and on like a lunatic, Kokichi was trying to put on the most innocent look he could muster given the situation. “I went to him yesterday before he left and asked him for it, since he’s gone for the weekend too and we might have needed it while he wasn’t here. Poor Kaito, he’s so stupid that he took that as the truth and handed it right over to me without a second thought, and now I’ve got you locked in there and it’s all his fault. Pretty sneaky, right?”

As much as Maki wanted to believe that the truth was at least a little different from what Kokichi was telling her, she had no reason to doubt any aspect of it. “No, you moron, it’s not sneaky at all! Now get the key you borrowed and let me out of here!”

“Yeah, you see, I took the key from Kaito so that no one could have it. I don’t know where it is, I took it and lost it and now you’re in there until when Shumai gets back, and do we really know when that’s going to be?” The smug expression that took over his innocent one was more punch-worthy than any other face Kokichi had ever worn, but there was nothing Maki could do about it. The cell door was locked, and it was such a secure lock that would require replacing the entire door to have a locksmith pop it open, and so she was effectively stuck in there until someone with a key could let her out. He seemed to think it was the most hilarious thing in the world, but she wasn’t laughing and she was never going to find anything funny about what he’d done.

“The second I get out of here, I’m breaking your kneecaps and then making you beg for mercy before I kill you outright,” she calmly, coldly said, before a wave of panic and desire to get out came over her. Without thinking about the consequences to her actions she tried kicking her way through the door, which only resulted in what felt like the metal snapping her ankle on the spot, bending it out of shape when her foot had barely hit the door. Her scream rivaled the one that Kokichi had given when he’d lured her to the cell in the first place, but where his was all in the name of a prank, hers was out of the pain she now felt coming from the foot she’d tried to use to aid in her escape.

“What’s going on over here?” Himiko asked, having been summoned by the sound of her friend screaming like she was being murdered. On one side of the cell door Kokichi was grinning, proud of the havoc he’d caused, while on the other Maki was balancing on one foot, her hurt one hanging off the ground a little to keep weight off of it, while she grimaced and tried to bear the pain. “I don’t think Maki’s supposed to be inside the cell. Should we call Kaito to ask him to let her out?”

“Don’t bother, Kokichi lost his key,” Maki explained through gritted teeth, denying Kokichi the chance to brag further about his ingenious plan to ruin their weekend there at the station. “So until Shuichi or Kyoko walk back into this building, I’m not getting out.”

Himiko nodded at the way the explanation was given to her, trying her best not to look at Kokichi and prompt him to talk to her. “I could always use my magic to help,” she said to the dismay of both of the others, who knew that Himiko’s magic was not real, never had been real, and never would be real. “Or I can ask Tenko to come by, she could beat the door down. Maybe Angie too, she’s good at praying for things to work out and then they do.”

“No thanks, to any of that.” Wincing at how much pain she felt due to her own actions, Maki leaned against the door a bit more, lifting her foot completely off of the ground. “Look, I know you want to help, but all of those options run the risk of Kokichi doing more stupid shit to make more of a mess, or there’s the chance that something breaks the door so that it can’t open, and I’d rather not have that happen.”

“If the door breaks, we can just get a new one.” It was immediately after she’d spoken that Himiko seemed to remember why that was not an option, and the pained, unamused look Maki had given her only helped matters. “Right, this door costs a lot of money so that it can’t be broken open. We don’t want to make people spend that money to fix it.”

Bouncing where he stood, finding every second of the dilemma he’d caused completely amusing even if he knew his days being able-bodied where certainly numbered, Kokichi had an idea that he couldn’t resist sharing. “I’ve got it, why don’t we just push all the blame for this on Kaito, since he’s the moron who decided to give me his key in the first place? That way, he gets fired, we all live happily ever after, everyone wins! Well, except for him, but it’s not like anyone cares about him, huh?”

Rather than acknowledge that suggestion with any sort of response, Maki decided that her time would be better spent setting up the cell so that she had some place to sleep and spend her time while she waited to be let out. “Himiko, go get something for me to eat, so that I’ve got food later,” she ordered, a command that Himiko accepted with a nod, while Kokichi did as he did best and mocked every word. “I’m going to make the best of this, which isn’t going to be easy but I’ll do it. I’ve slept in worse conditions before, this is nothing.”

“Yeah, you’ve slept in real jail cells before! With paper-thin mattresses and no one around to talk to you!” Kokichi was keeping up with his obnoxious behavior, but Maki couldn’t let it get to her more than it already had. What, was she going to punch the door next and cause herself even more pain? Every step she was taking was like stepping on needles, and she was forcing herself to move quickly to give herself somewhere to sit. While she worked, Kokichi kept calling in comments about her being trapped, or about whose fault it was that she couldn’t get out, and she got awfully good at tuning him out.

The only time she went back over to the door was when Himiko opened the sliding grate from the outside to shove food in, a couple bags of chips and a few bottles of water. “I’ll get you more when I go home tonight,” she promised, bowing her head as if she’d shamed herself for not being able to grab more. “You shouldn’t have to starve just because of a bully like Kokichi.”’

“W-why would you call me a bully? I didn’t do anything wrong here!” Feigning a cry, Kokichi waited until he had all eyes on him before he burst out laughing. “That’s totally a lie, I know what I did but it’s still not bullying. It would’ve been you in there instead, Himiko, if you’d gone in first. Unfortunately for Maki, you’re too lazy to do anything without being forced, so she’s the one who got locked up.”

“You can’t just go and start blaming me for this now!” Himiko slammed the grate shut, causing the metallic sound to echo through the building, but nowhere quite as bad as inside the cell, where Maki had to cover her ears and miss the rest of the conversation between the two. It wasn’t that she really care what kind of argument Himiko was going to make for her innocence, because she knew that she’d done nothing wrong and that Kokichi was just looking to lessen the blame on himself. What she did care about was knowing what the two of them were going to be getting up to now that she couldn’t take her role of being temporarily in charge as seriously as it needed to be, but it didn’t seem like that was a current topic of conversation or interest.

Eventually Kokichi got tired of being a pain in the neck and told them both that he was going to leave for the night, and when he decided he was done that was when Himiko chose to go home and take her long-awaited nap. That did mean that Maki was left alone at the station with nothing to do except sit in the cell and think about the many things she had on her mind, but she was used to the loneliness and could handle it. The thing she couldn’t handle came late in the evening, at about the time she’d been expecting to go home for herself, when the phone up at the front desk started ringing—and there was no one there to answer it, even though she was physically present.

All she could hope was that Shuichi wasn’t trying to call because something had gone wrong, and that her current situation would be enough to explain to him why his call went unanswered, but there was only so much hoping was going to do for her.


	2. Flooded

The water for the shower seemed to be on for a long time, and every minute that passed with it still running Kaede kept asking herself if perhaps she should try checking in on the person who was supposed to be showering. He seemed like a nice enough guy that he wouldn’t get too upset with her if she intruded on him with good intentions, but she also didn’t want to ruffle any feathers when they were going to have to spend the night in much closer quarters than they ever wanted to. She’d almost religiously watched the news report on the weather situation until it started repeating itself, but she’d learned enough to know that there was no sense in hoping for a better outcome of things. They were trapped there at the hotel, and even if they decided to go out and see if there was anything else the town had to offer there was a chance that they’d just get stranded in the car instead.

“I wonder if they serve meals here,” she mused, glancing at the clock to see the late hour and thinking about the coming morning’s breakfast. They’d stopped for dinner before they’d gotten too deep in their trip, so it wasn’t that she was hungry in that moment, but she knew that after a night of sleep (no matter how much or little she actually got), she would want to eat something. And if the hotel didn’t offer breakfast, she wasn’t sure if there would be much in the way of eating at all, due to the severity of the rainstorm that had opened up over the area. When reporters were calling for flooding of catastrophic levels, and they were within a kilometer of the nearby river, it was a huge recipe for disaster and they needed to play it safe and not leave.

Her attention was drawn back to the television when the program came back from a commercial break, immediately getting into a picture of the radar of the area, showing the heaviness of the rain that was falling. According to their data, there was a fair bit of lightning and thunder in the area, and Kaede found that hard to believe seeing as she hadn’t seen nor heard a thing. Standing up from the spinning chair, she made her way to the window in the room, pushing the curtains open to see a brilliant light show out in the distance, which proved the broadcast correct and her own assumptions wrong. The thing that bothered her more than the actual presence of lightning, though, was how streaked with water the glass was, making it hard to tell how wet anything else outside was.

“I really hope everyone else made it to town okay,” she said after watching the rain splash against the window for a minute or two. “I know they all wanted to fly to get there fast but I don’t see how anyone’s flying through this kind of storm. I thought we were being smart choosing to drive to get through it, but maybe their way will get them there faster after all, even if it’s not right on time.” She remembered the conversation she’d had with her manager when she’d called, explaining where they’d gotten trapped and being assured that there was no consequence to be faced regarding the situation. If no one was at the concert hall for practice the next day, it wasn’t realistic to punish any one person for missing out on things. “I hate that this is happening, why did the weather have to do this today, of all days?”

“Because that’s how the world works, you know.” Hearing Shuichi say anything was surprising enough, but because Kaede hadn’t heard the water turn off in the shower she was confused to hear his voice suddenly. She pulled the curtains closed and turned around to see him standing across the room, hair wet and flat against his head as he played with his hat in his hands. “I can’t get through to one of the people I work with, who was supposed to be waiting for me to let her know I made it here. Funny how things don’t go the way we need them to right when we need it most.”

“I totally get that, but still, we both have places we need to be! We can’t be expected to just spend all our time locked in a hotel room together! Not…like there’s anything wrong with being stuck somewhere with you, it’s just that you’re a stranger and I don’t know you well enough to know if being with you is a good thing or not.” As hard as she was trying to save face, Kaede knew she’d misspoken and that she was going to have to deal with the backlash from it. “Please don’t take that as me thinking you’re going to kill me or something, I know that you’re not going to do that.”

He shrugged, setting his hat on top of his belongings so that it wasn’t misplaced, before shaking out his hair and sending water flinging everywhere. “I didn’t think you meant I was a murderer, especially since you know I solve crimes for a living, not create them. But I also get it, I don’t know you much at all and here I am, being forced to share a bed with you just because it was that or drown in a flood, I guess.”

“Yeah, I should’ve thought about that, if you really wanted me dead you could’ve run us through the police barricade and called it a day.” Just thinking about how her life had been in someone else’s hands like that sent a shiver down Kaede’s spine, and she squished her eyes closed, trying to block the thought from lingering further. “I’m glad we were able to get this place, even though there’s some problems with it,” she said after reopening her eyes and putting a smile on her face. “I bet by the time we can safely leave, we’ll be much closer to each other than we’d ever—“

“I’m really not interested in getting close with you, sorry.” Shuichi’s words came out harsh, and stunned Kaede into staring at him with her jaw hanging, her hands moving to rest over the top of her heart. He realized what he’d said and how he said it, but just like she had before he knew that he couldn’t take anything back and had to just roll with it. “I don’t make a lot of friends, and this feels like the world is forcing us together and I can’t say I’m all for that, if that makes sense. Nothing personal against you, of course, but I wouldn’t be happy even if I was trapped here with someone I _am_ close with.”

His clarification made what he said feel a little less harsh, but Kaede still felt a bit of a sting from hearing him say that he wasn’t into getting close with her. “That’s totally fair, no worries!” she managed to spit out, putting on a grin and heading towards where all of her bags were stacked, narrowly missing bumping into Shuichi before she started digging through her belongings. “I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable, just like you don’t wanna make me uncomfortable, so everything’s perfectly fine here! We’ll get through this together, and then go back our separate ways, and call it a good time, right?”

“Something tells me that won’t be the case, but we can be hopeful.” While she was searching for whatever she wanted out of her bag, he made his way to the chair she’d been sitting in before, taking a seat and immediately feeling it try to spin underneath him. “You can shower or whatever now, I’m going to see what I can find out from the news and go from there. Hopefully someone back home will get to me soon with what they know, but there’s no guarantee that’s ever going to happen.”

“Okay, so…that’s fair too,” she said under her breath, not watching what Shuichi was doing but also not particularly caring to do so. In that moment, she only wanted to get out of her dress, to let down her hair, and to curl up in bed and sleep the whole situation off, so she couldn’t be bothered to care what he was doing because it didn’t impact what she was doing. When she felt her small bag of personal belongings that was tucked deep within one of her larger bags she cracked a smile to herself, pulling it out and opening it to see that everything she needed was safe and dry inside.

Taking the bag with her into the bathroom, the first thing Kaede noticed was that everything in there looked like it hadn’t been touched at all, other than the mirror being slightly fogged up from the steam. Shuichi had taken care to put everything as it had been when he’d come in, which she appreciated because it meant less work she had to do herself, but as she pulled her various soaps out of her bag to be able to use them, she did question how it was that he’d washed himself. It seemed like all he’d done was get in the shower to warm up, but that wasn’t anything she was going to be able to do, not with all the makeup she had caked on her face and the tightly curled buns in her hair.

She turned the water on and carefully ran a hand underneath the stream to feel the initial temperature, before pulling her fingers out and running them across her face, bringing some of the makeup off with them. It was ridiculous how much she had to doll herself up to look presentable when she had to be out in public, unless she wanted to receive scorn from the media for her nude face, and she almost wished that she didn’t have all that attention on her all the time. It would have been very nice to be able to live a life where she didn’t dress up constantly, or at least where she could have some piano performances for groups of students and not need a makeup crew to get her ready.

First it was taking off the makeup entirely, using some of the wipes she had stored in her bag, followed immediately by pulling all of the pins out of her hair and making the buns she’d been wearing fall into wild waves over her shoulders, hitting her back halfway down her shoulder blades. She thought she was much cuter when she wore her hair down rather than up, but her manager insisted that she keep it up as much as she could, and so the obnoxious hairstyles were something she’d reluctantly gotten used to. “What a pretty woman underneath all that fake stuff,” she remarked, getting a glimpse of her bare face and natural-enough hair before getting her dress off, ready to take her shower and feel refreshed after the day she’d had.

However long she was in there, it didn’t feel like long enough, but her time being alone with the scalding hot water was cut short when the water went from her perfect temperature to ice cold within seconds. She yelped at the change, thankful that she wasn’t covered in soap when it happened, and got herself out of the shower as fast as she could, grabbing a towel off of the rack only to find that it was clearly the one that Shuichi had used before her, as it was still wet from when he’d showered. That wasn’t as big of a problem as the water changing had been, even though her teeth were chattering until she was able to wrap herself nice and tightly in a dry towel. As she dried herself off she found that she was spending a lot of time thinking about the fact that she’d screamed and no one had bothered to check on her, which felt somewhat insulting and she somewhat wanted to call Shuichi out on it.

That changed when she finally got dressed in her pajamas (keeping on her bra underneath the sheer top because it felt too awkward to do anything else but that), and she stepped back into the main part of the room. It turned out that Shuichi hadn’t checked on her when she screamed because he simply wasn’t there; he hadn’t even had the decency to leave her a note on the room’s notepad to let her know where he was. “That’s rude, whatever,” she grumbled, eyeing the bed with a newfound sense of disdain and uneasiness towards the sleeping situation. “I guess I call dibs on whichever side I want and he just puts up with it.”

Feeling like that decision was the right one to make, she sat down on the left side of the bed and fluffed one of the pillows against the headboard, her uneasiness making her stomach begin to feel unsettled. How she was going to manage to sleep through the night in this situation, she didn’t know, but if her unwanted roommate had made himself scarce for the night that would make things a little easier to swallow. After the pillow felt fluffed enough she pushed the blankets down to the foot of the bed, kicking her legs up onto the mattress top before covering them back up, and laying down almost right away. The bed left much to be desired, even with her laying there alone, and she was only dreading how things would feel once someone else was there with her.

Her eyelids felt heavy as she got comfortable in her spot, but falling asleep before Shuichi was back would just mean him waking her up when he got into bed, so she had to stay strong and keep her eyes open as long as she could. Thankfully for her, he wasn’t gone much longer, coming into the room with a couple bottles of water under one arm and his phone in his other hand, typing something carefully on his keypad. “Oh, you’re already going to sleep,” he said when he saw that Kaede had gotten into bed. “I figured you’d still be awake and wanting to fight about the sleeping situation, but if you’re good, that’s fine with me.”

“I can fight again if you want,” she replied with a yawn that she couldn’t manage to stifle, the power of her exhaustion too much to combat in that moment. “But really, I’m just super tired and want to sleep before, like, the power goes out or something.”

“That was why I left the room, actually.” His face going neutral, lips tightening into a line, it had sounded like Shuichi was amused but his expression came off completely different, although Kaede wasn’t sure if that was what he intended or not. “I wanted to check with the front desk if there were any backup generators here, which the man up there says there is one, but he doubts it’ll be needed for any reason. Then, when I was about to come back up, a family staying somewhere else in the hotel offered me these waters and I took them, just in case the water supply here gets tainted or becomes boil-only.”

She yawned again, snuggling in a bit deeper to the blankets that felt so foreign compared to the plush ones she was used to using. “Sounds like you did a lot of big-thinking stuff that I wouldn’t have ever thought of,” she told him, hoping that she made him think she was impressed with his decisions. “I’m so glad you’re here for this, you have all these thoughts and ideas that are actually useful. I just wish…”

“What, we didn’t have to share a room? You didn’t have to be trapped in a low-budget hotel with a stranger?” When he spoke he spoke quietly, as if he didn’t actually want Kaede to hear what he was saying or have any responses to it, and she could tell that if she did in fact reply to either accusation she would catch him off-guard. To save them the trouble of rehashing points that had been made when they’d first had to get the room, she chose to stay quiet, keeping her wish to herself as she stopped fighting against the coming sleep.

She was jolted right back awake when Shuichi got into the bed next to her in the now-darkened room, him initially sticking socked feet against her legs and making her curl up a bit tighter. He apologized for the contact and adjusted how he was laying so that he was under one less blanket than her, to give them more of a barrier between them so a similar incident didn’t happen again, but his words fell on ears that couldn’t be bothered to listen. Even with the barrier she could tell that he was right there, that if either of them rolled over they’d be on top of their unlikely bedmate, and she was hoping and praying that no such thing would happen.

But she knew she wasn’t a delicate sleeper, and that if anything was going to go wrong while they were in bed it would be because of her thrashing, and the fear of making an enemy out of the detective beside her kept her awake much longer than she wanted to be. The sounds of the rain hitting the window at full force and his breathing kept her mind running, and yet she was unwilling to speak up and ask him if he was still awake. As her eyes adjusted to the darkened room she realized that their sleeping situation had sounded doable out loud, but in practice it wasn’t going to work, but as she thought about admitting that she heard him clear his throat. “Kaede, I don’t know how to say this without coming off as rude, but can you possibly share the blanket?” he asked in a whisper, his own exhaustion apparent in how he was talking. “It’s freezing in here, and we don’t even have the air on.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that.” She could agree that it was very cold, hence why she’d taken more of the blanket than she was supposed to, and as she relinquished some of it back to him she could feel the room’s bitter air beginning to hit her again. Were people not supposed to be able to share the beds at that hotel platonically? Were they expected to be on each other for warmth to make it through the night? “I wish there were more blankets we could use, this isn’t going to be fun to try to sleep through.”

“It wasn’t going to be fun anyway. Good night, Kaede.”

Such short words with her, and yet she didn’t know how to respond to them. “Y-yeah, good night to you too, Shuichi,” she finally decided on saying, trying to settle into the bed now that she had less blanket that before. Somehow she made it work and was able to finally fall asleep, hoping that when morning came there would be good news and positive changes in the world around them.

Instead, she woke up to a still-dark room, her phone softly ringing where it sat on the bedside table, and Shuichi managing to stay asleep despite the distraction. She poked her arm out from under the blanket and grabbed her phone, checking to see who was calling her and finding that it was her manager. It was too early to justify trying to have any conversation with her, and so Kaede ignored the call, put the phone on silent, and set it back down, intending on falling asleep for a little bit longer. But just knowing that her manager, the person in charge of her career and several aspects of her life, was trying to check in on her made her mind feel uneasy. There was the chance that some other development had taken place overnight and that she was in danger where she was, but by choosing to ignore the call she wasn’t going to find out until it was too late.

She had to be mindful about where she was and who she was with, and she was certain that if it was a serious matter, Shuichi would have also been being contacted by people concerned for his well-being. It wasn’t clear how many friends he had, but he definitely had coworkers that he cared about, and at least one of them knew where he was because they’d been the one to arrange him driving her to her concert in the first place. He had to have a bunch of connections among the police and other detectives in Kibou, as well as surrounding cities, to get him in his current position, and yet no one was trying to reach out to him, which she used as a point to settle her racing mind a bit. Whatever her manager had wanted couldn’t have been super important in that instance, and with that decided she was able to drift back off, intending on the next time she woke up to be at a much better time of morning.

It was still incredibly dim in the room when she was awake for the second time, but she didn’t have the feeling that there was someone in bed next to her when she woke up, and that was when she rolled over to see Shuichi gone once again, without having bothered saying he was leaving in the first place. With the extra space in the bed now hers to use, she stretched out, her body sore from how she had been curled up to keep herself in check while sleeping. His side of the bed was cold, which was to be expected given that he was up and about somewhere outside of the room, but she didn’t realize that she’d find it odd how cold it already was.

“Oh geez, I hope I didn’t bully him out of the bed,” she said to herself, mentally drafting an apology she could deliver to him if she was, in fact, the reason he’d already gotten up. “I warned him about how I sleep, but he could’ve told me that I was bothering him. I mean, I woke up once in the middle of the night and he was still there, he could’ve woken me up himself too.”

Her thoughts almost immediately drifted to what had woken her up the first time, and she checked her phone to see if any further developments had been made in her sleep. The only missed call she had was from her manager, but there were several messages that were given urgent titles and that asked her to reply right away. The one that bothered her most was the one from her father, who she didn’t regularly talk to and must have meant business if he was trying to contact her. With trembling fingers she opened that message first and saw that it was merely him asking her where she was and how she was doing, because he’d heard about the people being stranded in various places due to the storm and he had no idea if she was impacted by anything.

Sighing in relief, Kaede replied that she was in a small town (she couldn’t even remember the name of the place) and that she was stuck there because of flooding issues, but that she was alive and staying at a hotel. She left out the part where she was sharing a room with a detective she’d only met the day before, not because her father would disapprove of her sharing a room with a stranger, but rather because she knew how he felt about detectives in general due to personal reasons. He didn’t respond immediately but that was fine by her, because it gave her time to reply to everyone else asking her if she’d made it to her destination and where she was if she hadn’t, and so when he messaged back that he was going to keep her in mind and to be safe, she was prepared for it.

After seeing his message and knowing that he’d been told a half-truth at best, she wanted to rectify her deceit and tell him the truth, but as long as he was content with things there was zero reason for her to cause any issues. Her father cared about her deep down, he was incredibly proud of what his little girl had become, but he wouldn’t be able to say anything positive if he knew about Shuichi and the bed and the sleeping under the same blankets despite being strangers. Hell, she could barely keep things positive about that particular aspect in her mind, and she wasn’t the one who had deep-rooted issues with detectives and police as a whole. “Once I’m out of here I’ll never have to think about any of this again,” she reminded herself quietly, trying to slow her racing mind. “I’m doing what I have to right now, but this isn’t going to be what happens forever.”

Next to where her phone had stayed overnight was the remote for the television, which she turned on after sitting up and adjusting how her top was sitting on her shoulders, covering up the straps to her bra after her rough night’s sleep. The channel was the same as it had been the night before, which made sense but she was a bit surprised that Shuichi hadn’t gone through looking for something else to watch to learn about their surroundings. It was a different reporter than it had been when she’d first watched, but in the background she could see that familiar face looking tired and ragged, almost as if her shift as the person on screen had just ended.

The man giving the report now was a lot more stern-voiced about the situation, barking out all of the information he had at a steady pace. “If you are anywhere close to a body of water and you can get to higher, safer ground, do it _now_ ,” he said, slamming a fist into his other open hand with every word. “This is not a drill, it is do or die now, people. Places across the country are flooding rapidly, and until the rain lets up we cannot give you any estimate of when they’ll stop flooding. Rivers, creeks, ponds, lakes, if it’s water it’s going to double, triple, even quadruple in size before this is over.”

The seriousness in his voice made Kaede’s stomach tighten more than it had already been, due to her having just woken up and having not eaten anything yet that morning, but she couldn’t turn her attention away from the reporting, especially not when it shifted to pictures that viewers had sent in of damage in their area. A lot of the images came from places that she’d heard of but never been to, small towns and places along highways that wandering travelers stopped in, not anywhere that famous musicians ended up, but seeing them was still punches to her already-shaken core. Then came a picture of what was labeled as a missing bridge and she first thought that it was the bridge in the town she was currently in, but then more, different bridge pictures appeared and it became apparent that the flooding and raging waters had taken out a _lot_ of bridges across the country.

When it cut back to the reporter, she had no idea if she’d seen anything for the area surrounding the hotel, but she did know that she’d seen a lot more flooding and destruction than she’d ever imagined she would, and to know that she was somewhere in the middle of the chaos was a lot to wrap her mind around. Perhaps her father wasn’t quite at ease about knowing where she was as she’d assumed, if things really were as bad as everyone was painting them to be.

At the other side of the room, the door’s lock unlatched and the door was pushed open, Shuichi walking in with his hat partially over his eyes and another outfit meant for investigating on his body. He’d gone down to the lobby to scope out what other guests were up to, and had found out roughly the same things that Kaede had just by watching the news, albeit at the cost of a lot of social interaction he never wanted. “You should see how many people are here right now,” he said, as Kaede turned to greet him with a small, acknowledging nod. “It’s kind of insane how many people came here to get away from the water, even though we got the last room.”

“Is the flooding bad around here?” she asked, remembering that they were near the river but not recalling how close they were at all. “The guy on the news said to get to higher ground, so if this is the higher ground, I guess that would make sense, right?”

“This would, in fact, be the higher ground in the area, and yes, the flooding is pretty bad. That area we were stopped in because of the bridge being gone is completely underwater, and it’s only getting worse.” He grimaced, thinking about the homes and businesses that were submerged because of the rising waters, but reacted by pulling the brim of his hat down a bit further over his eyes. “We aren’t in any danger here, but it may get to the point where this is the only place on this side of the river that isn’t flooded, and since you can’t leave town because of the road washing out…”

“We’re not opening up floor space for more strangers to sleep on.” Her response was decisive, and she wasn’t even sure if that was what he was going for, but Kaede had let the guilt of sharing a bed with a detective go to her head and she wasn’t going to make herself feel worse. “Sorry, but I can’t handle having to awkwardly meet more people than just you on this trip.”

His whole body shook for a second, as if her words sent a shiver down his spine that he couldn’t stop, but he gave a firm nod once he’d collected himself. “Naturally. There are homes around here that have opened their doors to their neighbors, and those are above the potential flood level as well so people will have places to stay that aren’t on the floor here. I was more worried about eating with all of these mouths and not a lot of food to fill them with. The management here thinks they’ve got about three days’ worth of meals for this half of the town available to them, then things get a bit sketchy.”

“Just what I wanted to hear, we’re going to starve to death in a small town during a historic flood. Exactly the way I wanted to go.” Her words were sarcastic, and she hoped that Shuichi could catch that, but one of Kaede’s favorite things to do when she wasn’t performing was to have grand meals where she could eat whatever she wanted, at someone else’s expense. She’d already convinced herself that having to eat rationed meals where she didn’t get to choose her food was okay, given the situation, but now that she knew she’d only get a few days to eat before she’d have nothing she was beginning to internally freak out. “I didn’t even pack any kind of snacks in my bags to bring with me. Mostly because I forget I have them and then they get smashed and melted and…it’s better if I just get things wherever I am, and now there’s nothing I can even get?”

“Calm down.” Two words, said loudly like a demand but timidly like he was scared of how she’d react to them. She looked at Shuichi and saw him taking his hat off as he fully came into the room, revealing that underneath it he’d snagged a couple of individually-wrapped muffins, and he took those and tossed them towards her. “I may or may not have done some research into who you are before I agreed to drive you, and I learned some things that you might not be proud to know are online about you.”

“Honestly, whatever you found doesn’t scare me,” she replied, having caught the muffins and was already in the process of unwrapping one of them. “It’s not like I do anything illegal or inappropriate in my spare time, and I don’t have anyone to send nude pictures of myself to so those aren’t a thing or anything like that.”

Even though he was beyond flustered at her mentioning him having potentially seen naked images of her, Shuichi had to finish explaining what he’d started. “Yeah, uh, as it turns out…there’s a lot of people out there who like crudely taking pictures of you playing piano and turning them into pictures of you trying to touch different food things inappropriately. Is eating something you talk about during concerts or something?”

“Not really, no.” She had just been about to bite into the first muffin, but hearing him bring up such an absurd mental image made her set it down onto its wrapper and not want to try eating it again. Of course there were people out there doing that to her, she didn’t fit the “traditional” image of what someone famous looked like and people had constantly criticized her for being a bit rounder around the edges ever since she’d found fame from her piano-playing talent. “Sounds like you stumbled upon some rude people’s fat jokes and bought right into them, so, like, thanks for that.”

“Whoa there, I didn’t say I bought into anything about them. The muffins came from me reading a blog post someone made about you and things that you looked like you’d like. They were the only thing I could find downstairs in the lobby that was on that list.” Shuichi’s attempt to save the conversation from where he’d accidentally sent it seemed solid, but the way that Kaede glared at him and put both muffins on the bedside table told him that he hadn’t been successful. “Come on, Kaede. Eat them.”

“Why, so you can make fun of me for eating when you’re not?”

“Listen, I already ate while I was downstairs. Bowl of oatmeal. Nothing special, but I didn’t want to risk you not liking it if I made you one as well. Now please just eat so I know you’re not starving all morning.” His pleas sounded genuine, as did his reason for why he didn’t have food of his own, but the whole idea of him finding people’s posts about shaming her for her curves and using them as research was not sitting well inside of her. But she _was_ hungry, and denying herself food made no sense when it was right there for her, so she ended up eating the opened muffin and saved the second one for later.

Once she’d eaten she expected that they’d get on with their day, but Shuichi did not seem to have anything in mind for them to do, not even talking about what else he’d learned down in the lobby. That led to awkward silences between them, her not having forgiven him for what he’d said and him not sure where there was to go after telling her about what he’d seen online. Eventually they decided on just sitting in the room watching the news and hearing about the destruction that the storm was causing all around them, with the only disruptions coming when they’d get up to stretch their legs, or when she got up to change into clothes less revealing than her pajamas. It was while she was coming back from doing that that she decided to look out the window, to see how hard the rain was still coming down outside.

The landscape she saw from that upper-floor hotel room was soggy and rain-drenched, and looked nothing like anything she’d seen before. The river was swollen, flooded far past its normally beautiful banks and calling all of the surrounding land its new home, and she could see rooftops of houses forming islands in the raging waters. The road—which she assumed was the one they’d driven into town on the night before—disappeared into the water on their side of the river and she couldn’t see where it emerged out in the distance, due to how far the water had risen. Looking down into the hotel parking lot, she was happy to see that there wasn’t much water that had collected, but there was enough that it was splashing up the sides of cars here and there.

“If you walk out the front door, there’s some dry spots in the parking lot, but where it dips lower you can get puddles as high as, say, my knee,” Shuichi said, noticing what Kaede was doing and how, exactly, her head was positioned, assuming where she was looking correctly without any questions. “I managed to get out to the car without too much in the way of flooding stopping me, and it’s up on a bit higher spot in the lot so it’ll be fine, but there are some unlucky people here whose cars will be water-damaged or destroyed.”

“That’s horrible, I feel so sorry for those people!” Shaking her head as she tried to imagine just how high that water really was, and how it would go a little bit above her knee if she were to step in those puddles he’d referred to, Kaede wished that something could be done to help everyone who was going to lose their car in the rain, but she knew that there were far too many people in that boat even for her to help. “I’m glad that your car isn’t going to end up like all of theirs, you’re gonna need that to get us out of here.”

“Uh, yeah, about that, I don’t think I’ll be driving us out of here anytime soon, as bad as that is to have to say.” He was fidgeting with the end of his hat again, a nervous tic that Kaede had noticed was one that he frequently had when he was talking about anything that wasn’t simply kind and gentle. “They’re saying it’ll take weeks for the flooding to go down, and with all the damage that’s taken place due to the rain, there’s no telling when they’ll be able to get the roads usable again. The bridge problem is bad enough, but there’s been multiple landslides over the road going the other way and…you get it, I’m sure.”

What he was trying to tell her made perfect sense in her mind, but she did not want to have to believe a word of it. “No, I don’t get it. Shuichi, you can’t be telling me that I’m stuck here, with you, for longer than I was even gonna be out of town doing shows! By the time we get to leave, it’s gonna be time for be to go back to Kibou and plan my next tour and I don’t want to do that yet, I want to do my shows I already agreed to play!”

“I didn’t say we were going to be here that long, calm down!” Speaking with a laugh, Shuichi could obviously hear the rising panic in Kaede’s voice and wanted her to know that things were nowhere near as bad as she was making them seem. “It’s going to be just long enough for them to be able to safely fly into the area to pick people up. The general idea is that they’re going to wait until the rain is completely out of the picture and the river isn’t getting worse, so that they can bring in supplies for those who need them, and to start getting people out. Since you’re easily the most famous and popular here, you’d probably be one of the first ones airlifted.”

“That’s good for my fans,” she said, letting the panic subside in her chest a little. “I can’t disappoint them by having to cancel everything for the coming months. Sure, there are tons of people who can play piano, but there’s only one Kaede Akamatsu who can do it like the classical pianists of old!”

He didn’t know if there was an appropriate way to react to such a bragging statement, so Shuichi chose to shrug it off and move on. “So you’d be first out, along with any sick people or families with children, and then they’d get everyone else who wants or needs to get out, which means I’d be around longer, but that’s not a huge problem.” His hands came off of his hat and began picking at the front of his black shirt, still anxiously moving about something or other. “It’s not like my reason for needing to go anywhere will still be there when this is over. Your fans will still exist, my crime scene won’t.”

“Right, but maybe detectives who are in the city will have been able to look it over for you? I mean, it’s not like you’re the only detective in the world.” She smiled at him, hoping that her pointing that out would help him accept what was going to happen.

That was not in the cards, though, and he proved that with his response, which came in an exasperated breath. “I’m not the only detective in the world, but I’m the one that they think could piece any of the wild stuff about this crime spree together! I’m failing everyone in the country by not solving this crime, we’ve got a dangerous criminal prowling the streets that I can’t stop because I’m here with you, not looking at yet another thing they’ve done!” By his last words his voice was cracking and she could tell he was almost in tears, and her reaction was immediately to go and hug him, but he pushed her off and rejected the physical display of care. “No, don’t hug me, this is why I’m not good enough to work on my own. Every time they put me in a position of authority I go and screw it up.”

“I don’t think anyone could say you screwed a thing up about any of this,” she quietly said, giving him an air-hug in lieu of a real one, just to be mindful of how he felt. “You didn’t ask for the rain to fall like it did, or for the bridge to collapse, or any of that. It just kind of happened to you.”

“I’m the one who chose to drive in the first place! I could’ve just flown the distance, gotten there before the storm got bad, and I’d be at the scene right now looking it over. And you…you could’ve flown too, and that would’ve solved your problems as well.” Tears were brimming in Shuichi’s eyes, his frustration with the situation reaching a level that he could no longer contain. “It was a dumb choice to think driving was the way to go with this, and now we’re both stuck accepting that we screwed up.”

“No, that’s not true! If we’d screwed up, we’d be dead in the water trying to jump the river or something last night. We did what we needed to do with the choices we’d made, and no one was expecting any of this to happen.” Pressing a finger to her lips, Kaede could still faintly smell the muffin she’d eaten on it but she couldn’t let that distract her from trying to be inspirational. “And might I remind you that flights weren’t going yesterday because of the weather? So we wouldn’t have gotten there anyway.”

“That’s true, but I’d rather be stuck in the airport at home than in this hotel room.” The words _with you_ were lingering on Shuichi’s tongue but he felt he’d more than driven the fact that he didn’t like being stuck with her into her skull. She was plenty nice, if a bit disillusioned with the way the normal world worked, but he didn’t know her and he felt like any attempt at changing that would just end in frustration. “At least if I was home, I could call on a friend or two to come spend time with me while I waited to leave.”

She knew that changing Shuichi’s mind on the matter was not really going to work in her favor, and upsetting him was the least favorable thing to do in her position. “Well, you may not have any of your friends, but you’ve got me, and I’m sure I’m better than nothing.”

“Honestly, being alone would be preferable.”

It stung to hear, but was acceptable coming from him. “I can understand that. You totally seem like the stoic, loner guy who doesn’t want to talk to people unless you start the conversation. I’ll keep that in mind for the rest of the time we’re here together. That is, unless you’re gonna tell me you found somewhere else to stay.”

“No, I’m here with you in this room as long as we’re calling this hotel home.” Shuichi let go of his shirt and wiped his eyes, the tears coming off onto the back of his hand with ease, and he dried his now-wet hands on his pants. “I’m sorry, this is just a horrible situation for us to be in and I’m trying my best to handle it but it’s hard, you know? I don’t do well with people and yet here I am, stuck trying to make things work with you.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t do super well with people either. Not because I don’t like people, but because I spend so much time touring with my piano and my show that I can’t really keep in touch with others easily. I’ve got friends, but most of them I haven’t seen in a long time and…yeah, I get not doing well with people.” She was speaking the truth, as far as she believed it to be, and she could only hope that her honesty would help him out a little. “I did see some of my friends while I was in Kibou for the past couple weeks, squeezed in between rehearsals and shows and meet and greets and all that. It was really nice to play catch-up with them, but at the same time it wasn’t.”

“Sounds like a famous-person problem to me,” he mumbled, not wanting to come off as rude for thinking it but also not wanting her to miss out on learning that her position was not at all one he connected with. “My friends see me all the time because I work with them, because we all need money to get by and most of us have talents that the police force in town could make use of.”

She inhaled sharply, wanting to correct him about how what he was saying wasn’t true and that plenty of people had problems like she did, but once again the thought that upsetting him wasn’t the best choice crossed her mind and she had to back down. There had to be another way to approach things that would work with him, and after giving it a moment’s thought she figured she had something to attempt. “Okay, that’s fair and all, but can I ask you something? Move to a different topic, kinda?” His blank, empty stare that he gave her was his only answer, but she took it as a positive and moved on. “You work for the police in Kibou, obviously, because that’s why you’re here with me, but you’re a detective, so doesn’t that mean you work with Kyoko Kirigiri?”

“How do you know who Kyoko is?” he asked, surprised to hear his informal boss’ name in conversation with Kaede, of all people. “She works with me sometimes, but her place is at the main headquarters and not at the station I’m in charge of.”

“I know her through some people, I’m not super familiar with her but I could definitely pick her out of a crowd. Like, a crowd of people, not a crowd of fans, that’d be weird to do.” Kaede almost wondered if it would be worth explaining how she knew Kyoko, but the way that Shuichi seemed curious, looking at her with his head tilted slightly to the side, it was clear that it was what needed to be done. “There’s someone she hangs around with outside of work that I know, and then there’s someone else she’s friends with that I’ve got a mutual friend with. Sure, both of my contacts are rich or famous, but it’s something, and it’s how I know your detective leader there in Kibou.”

“Hm, I suppose it’s something.” Shuichi didn’t sound amused by her revelation, but he also didn’t seem like he was bothered by it, even though his initial surprise had definitely worn off now that he knew the truth. “She does have a rather prominent name and a background that would allow her to rub elbows with people who are much more famous than she is. Having the headmaster of a prestigious school for a father would do that, even though…well, I’m sure you know how that situation is.”

“Not particularly. I know her father was the headmaster for Hope’s Peak Academy, but that’s about it.” She was speaking the truth, and Kaede almost regretted bringing Kyoko up in the first place, now that she was making it obvious that she didn’t know much about her at all. “I knew of the school before that too, they once sent my parents a letter trying to recruit me but by then I was already dedicated to my current path and they weren’t going to strip me of my dreams just to go to a good high school.”

His insides tightening hearing what she had to say, Shuichi wanted to have the strength to put her in her place about that sort of selfishness. He’d heard of the school as well, long before he’d met Kyoko and known about her connections there, but he hadn’t been given the opportunity to attend such a well-to-do school. “That was nice of them, you’ve really made a career out of being a classical pianist,” he said, even though he didn’t know the extent of her piano-playing skills and if he was actually being genuine with his praise. “You wouldn’t have wanted to attend anyway, from what I understand. The place was crawling with weirdos and other unsavory people.”

“As if either of our professions keep us away from those kind of people.” All Kaede could think about were the creeps she’d encountered before and after her shows, guys asking her to marry them and girls wanting to show off their assets to her because of their love. She could only assume that Shuichi’s life as a detective had him going up against some real crazies as well, on top of the criminals he was investigating. “But I wouldn’t have done well in actual classrooms by that point, all of my tutoring got done at pianos so that I could practice playing every chance I had.”

“Whereas my learning happened in under-funded classrooms with far too many students, yet another major difference in the lives we’ve led.” Now he was beginning to sound annoyed, even though Kaede didn’t think that talking about her special brand of schooling would be something he could get upset about. She apologized for talking about things like she had and hoped they could move on, and move on Shuichi did, by turning his attention back to the ever-present television broadcast. “I hope that things clear up ahead of their schedule, I don’t want to be stuck here with everyone for weeks.”

She hadn’t seen the potential crowd of people down in the lobby, which made her interested in knowing why he felt that way in particular. “Do you mind if I go downstairs to see how everyone’s doing?” she asked, watching him jolt upright and shake his head furiously. “Oh, wow, you _do_ mind that I do things. What, do you not want to lose me or something? I promise I won’t be gone long.”

“Kaede, as long as we’re together you’re my responsibility, and with how many people are down there I don’t know if you joining them is the safest option. The last thing I want is for you to get mobbed when people realize there’s a famous pianist here and that she could play music for them.” He covered his mouth as soon as the last words left his lips, and hearing her gasp as she caught what that meant let him know he was doomed. “I mean, there’s a piano down in the lobby, someone was trying to play it while I was there and I…thought of how you’d appreciate knowing it’s there.”

“I don’t care about my safety if there’s a piano here,” she told him, completely serious about how she felt. “I’m going to entertain the masses, maybe calm them down a little, make everyone happier with the fact that they’re stuck here. Come on, Shuichi, let’s go show everyone what real music sounds like!”

He continued shaking his head, before heaving a sigh. “No, I can’t stop you if that’s what you want to do. I’ll go with just to make sure everyone keeps their hands off of you, because I do need to make sure you stay alive, but I can’t stop you from doing what you wish.” His eyes falling onto her, he gave her a quick once-over, checking to make sure that she was appropriately dressed for going into such a large crowd. “I think you’re decent enough to make this happen. Perhaps people won’t even recognize you, without all your makeup and fancy clothes and whatnot.”

“Oh, they’ll recognize me the second I start playing music,” she assured him, knowing the level of her own talent and how she was much better than any amateur pianist could claim to be. “Let’s go down right now so I can show off, my fingers are itching to hit the keys!”

Despite the fact that he was much lither than she was, she was able to get to the door before he was, excitement pulsing through her veins and coming out as her being unable to quite stand still. They left the room together, him making sure he had the key to get back in on his person so that they could return when she was done having her fun, and once again she beat him to their next destination. Exactly like he’d said, there were many people crowded into the lobby, but none of them seemed to be noticing anyone joining them, although Kaede’s loud yelp when she heard the badly-played piano music did draw some attention. “Don’t do anything brash,” he warned, reaching to grab her arm but stopping himself because he wasn’t sure how the contact would go over. “It’s on the other side of the lobby, but get over there carefully and patiently, please.”

She disregarded exactly what he’d said and pushed her way through the crowd, using her shoulders to knock people to the side as she looked for the piano to save it from its currently horrible player. The culprit turned out to be a small child, with a beginner’s book of sheet music spread out in front of him, but Kaede didn’t care that the kid was trying to learn. “Hey, uh, do you think I can play?” she asked him, watching him stop indignantly and turn to look at her—and have his jaw drop when he saw that it was a trained pianist talking to him. He snatched his music and slid off the bench without any fuss, letting Kaede sit in his place (although after having to push the bench back a bit, to get her legs in between it and the base of the piano). She cracked her knuckles, put a big smile on her face, and set her fingers to the keys, taking in the fact that she was going to get to play in such an unexpected place before she started hitting notes that she had committed to memory for years.

At once, with the sound of her technical skill filling the room, everyone quieted down and began looking for the source of the music. Shuichi was in awe of how the entire atmosphere had changed in a split second, but he too found himself looking at where the music was coming from, seeing Kaede in her natural state with her speed and accuracy of hitting her notes. He was able to get to her side fairly easily now that everyone was standing relatively still, and once he was there he was turning around looking at all of the staring eyes facing back in their direction. “How in the world are you this good?” he asked quietly, not wanting his voice to overshadow the music that he was being treated to. “This is otherworldly, you really sound like a classical pianist.”

“That would be because I _am_ one, silly!” Her answer was whispered, and if Shuichi hadn’t been so close to her he wouldn’t have heard it. She was completely at ease playing, to the point that she could talk and keep playing even without music in front of her, and the people there in the lobby were slowly beginning to recognize her. When the song finished a roar of applause filled the air, and Kaede turned around to smile at everyone who’d been watching her; a chant started up for her to play another song and she followed the demand, turning back around and beginning a much sadder-sounding piece that had everyone silent in seconds once again.

Shuichi wanted to continue playing bodyguard for her, but at the same time he was using his vantage point to look around the lobby and see what was happening. Almost everyone’s attention was on Kaede, people taking full advantage of having such a famous person in their midst to get a free concert from, but there were a couple back towards the front desk that weren’t paying any attention to the music. He tapped Kaede’s shoulder gently once, to let her know he was moving away, before setting off through the crowd, his destination to see what was going on with those few people.

“You really weren’t kidding when you said that there was a pianist here,” the man standing behind the front desk said when he saw Shuichi coming towards him, crossing his arms in front of him. “Between you and the brat up here last night, I should’ve known you were telling the truth but anyone can claim to be a pianist, y’know?”

“I’m glad you can believe me now, since she’s down here playing her music for everyone and taking all our minds off the rain for a moment.” It would’ve been a lie if Shuichi said he hadn’t expected Kaede to rush downstairs the moment she learned there was a piano in the lobby, and he’d wanted her to do it so that he could have this exact conversation. “Now that you know I’m being serious about Kaede Akamatsu being at the hotel, can you please do us a favor and get her a room of her own? Someone famous like her needs their own space.”

The man laughed, shaking his head as he leaned over to a woman leaning against the counter, who was watching Shuichi with a smug smile. “Wish I could do that, but I’m sure you’ve heard that the place is fully booked. What am I supposed to do, expect someone to give up the room they booked to accommodate her? There’s nowhere she can go aside from staying with you, unless you wanna shove her into someone else’s room.”

“No, I couldn’t do that to her.” Glancing back over the crowd to where Kaede was still going through her second song, Shuichi felt a bit guilty for continuing wanting to get out of sharing a room with her, but he needed his alone time. He lived alone for a reason, he worked relatively alone for a reason, he did most investigations alone for a reason, and this experience was shoving him far out of his comfort zone in that regard. But even though she was still a stranger to him, he couldn’t push her out of his life when he’d agreed to let her be in it for a little while, especially when she’d done nothing wrong.

“You’re a lucky fella, I hope you know,” the man continued, side-eyeing the woman he was close to as he spoke. “Most men your age would kill to get to share a bed with someone famous like her, and here you are considerin’ giving her up for some reason. Don’t take what you’ve been given for granted, detective. You’ll regret it if you do.” The woman nodded along with his words, before turning to kiss the man, and it was while they were in the middle of their romantic embrace that Shuichi decided he should go back over to Kaede to continue protecting her.

When he returned to standing behind her, the first thing he noticed was that people had started putting money down on the bench next to her, tipping her for her musical service. Everyone _had_ to have known who she was, it wasn’t exactly normal for someone to be so talented at the piano, yet they were still showering her in money, as well as loud applause every time she paused to change to a different song running through her mind. In spending the time listening to her play there, he could understand why people wanted to see her in concert so badly, and why she’d been elevated to the level of fame she’d attained in the music world in the past few years. He made the mental note to ask her about some of her favorite songs sometime when she abruptly stopped playing, her hands curled up into tight fists that she drew in closer to her body. “I can’t keep going,” she mumbled, knowing that Shuichi was right there to hear her. “My fingers are locking up, I didn’t stretch them before playing and I can’t risk damaging them.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked her, as the crowd began chanting for her to continue. “I’m not loud enough to tell everyone that message. You’ve got to do it yourself.”

She huffed, before standing up from the piano, knocking some of the money onto the floor without realizing it. “Hey, everyone, I’m super sorry but I can’t go on right now, I’ll come down and play again tonight for you all if that makes it any better, but right now I’ve got to…” She waved her fists around, narrowly missing knocking Shuichi in the back of the head with one of them. “I’ve got to make sure I don’t hurt my hands. Sorry again!”

The little boy from before, who’d been using the piano as his personal practice area, walked in front of her and looked up with stars in his eyes. “Miss Akamatsu, can I try playing again?” His question was innocent and pure, and she smiled at him before gesturing for him to take the bench, letting him resume what he’d already started, but now as a follow-up to someone that he clearly recognized and adored.

They went back upstairs to whispers from people asking who Shuichi was, or from people so shocked to see Kaede there at their hotel that they didn’t know what to do. “That’s totally going to end up on every news station everywhere, but I think it was worth it to make that kid’s day,” Kaede decided when they got back into their room, the door tightly latched and secured after entry. “I sure do love having such young fans, everyone wants to pretend that classical music is for old folks only but that kid just proves that wrong.”

“Yeah, you really seemed to please him by existing.” Some of the whispers he’d heard as they were leaving the lobby had finally started to linger in Shuichi’s mind, but he didn’t know how to deal with any of them beyond dwelling too much on them. He’d heard him get called some mystery man, or some illicit lover, and neither of those titles fit him in the current situation but he had no way to change people’s perception of him. As far as anyone was aware, he was there to hook up with Kaede and that was the extent of their relationship, which could put them both in gossip magazines for ages until something else scandalous happened, and just the thought of being newsstand fodder made him shudder. His professional image could be damaged by those sorts of rumors, to the point that he could lose his job and credibility, all for a complete misunderstanding.

He was brought back to reality by Kaede waving a hand in front of his face, making him blink a few times to re-orient himself there in the hotel room. “Hello, earth to Shuichi! I was asking you if you’d ever heard some of those songs played like that before, but you kind of spaced out and I couldn’t tell if you were listening.”

“Er, sorry about that. I hadn’t heard anything quite like what you were playing, even though I know I recognized some of those songs. How did you do that without any music to read?” He didn’t know much about how musicians worked but he knew that they tended to need their notes laid out in front of them, something that Kaede hadn’t had, and she quickly dove into explaining her process and how she was so familiar with those versions of those songs that she could play them from memory. “Huh, that’s really neat. Didn’t know that people playing piano could do that.”

“Most can’t,” she admitted with a smile, “but that’s what I get for being the piano freak that I am. Just one of my many talents relating back to music, I guess.” It was looking at her after that where he realized that behind the smile she was giving, her eyes were teeming with sadness, and he didn’t know how to address that without coming off as prying. By the time she next spoke, the look was gone and she was back to being chipper as always. “I’m so glad that I could do that for those people, be such a bright spot in their kinda bad day, and honestly? Hearing them happy made me not so upset about all of this happening to us.”

“I’m glad to hear it, can’t say the same for me but it’s something.” Shuichi wished he could take even a portion of Kaede’s optimism and positive attitude for himself, but he knew that he was not going to change his mindset on anything. He still wanted to be alone, he didn’t want to have to keep being in the same space as her, but at least now they were talking without it being primarily negative things being said. As they settled back down into the room, the television on as background noise to keep them updated on the outside world, the thought kept crossing his mind to ask her more about what she was passionate about, but he kept pushing it out because he didn’t want to have that conversation. Sure, things weren’t quite as awkward between them as they had been before, but he didn’t want her to start thinking he _enjoyed_ her company.

They left the room several times that day, once to go down to the lobby at lunchtime and again at dinnertime, and then Kaede went down later in the evening for an encore at the piano, giving Shuichi the time alone he so desperately craved. It wasn’t the existence they wanted to be leading but it was the one that they were having to take control of, and they were doing their best to make the most out of the poor situation. After she’d finished her playing, she came back to the room to see him sitting in the desk chair, watching the television with enraptured eyes that didn’t budge when she’d opened the door, and rather than interrupt his focus she grabbed her pajamas and went to take a shower, preparing herself to tuck in for the night.

The moment the water turned on, she was leaning against the sink counter, tears bubbling from her eyes and streaming down her cheeks. “I can’t keep this up,” she sobbed, trying to stay quiet enough that the sound of the water would drown her out. “Especially not when my parents find out that I’m here with him, and that he’s a detective, and that we’re sharing a bed and…and…” Her next word never came, because she began crying too hard to speak, her sobs becoming wheezing coughs that ripped Shuichi’s attention from the news report to investigate what was going on.

Without letting her know he was there, he leaned against the bathroom door to listen to what was going on, thinking that something was wrong with Kaede and needing to understand the situation before any actions were taken. “I know that he’s here as a favor to me, but I didn’t ask for this,” she continued, his ears perking at the use of the pronoun that he knew was referring back to him. “I should’ve told them I could find my own way, or that I’d do the drive but not with a detective. This is just going to ruin everything and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m betraying…no, worse, I’m stomping on your memory, and I hate myself for it.”

He stepped back from the door, confused about what he’d heard because as far as he knew, he hadn’t done a single thing wrong. Yet there Kaede was, crying in the bathroom about how being there with him was so harmful to the memory of someone. Curiosity began to overtake Shuichi’s mind, but he couldn’t exactly admit to having heard anything she’d said when she wanted her private time to let her façade break, and so he had to remind himself that he was a detective and that he could get to the bottom of things without being outright about them. As long as he was going to be there with Kaede, however long it really was, he could work to piece together whatever had her so upset and make her see that she didn’t need to feel guilty about it. In the meantime, he’d work extra hard to make sure that their bed-sharing stayed completely separate and platonic, and that he overstepped as few boundaries with her as he possibly could.

Having heard what he had made things a bit more challenging when Kaede did finally come out of the bathroom, freshly showered and acting like nothing was wrong. He chose to address the issue by falling back into his stoic behavior, ignoring her in favor of the television screen even as she began making herself comfortable in the bed for a second night together. “Aren’t you going to sleep sometime?” she asked him, no sign of any sort of crying evident in her voice, as well as a complete lack of acting like she didn’t want to talk to him despite what she’d been saying to herself. “I’m going to fall asleep here soon and if you’re not in bed when that happens, I’m going to end up waking up again.”

“If you’re asking me to go to bed now, just say it that way,” he replied, earning himself a huffy rewording of her question that fit his mold. He turned the news off and hit the lights in the room, darkening everything except for the area around the window, where the ambient sound of raindrops kept its still-steady pace. As he tucked in beside her, their barrier of a single blanket still present and doing its job well, he wondered why she was pretending like nothing was wrong when he knew what he’d heard her saying.

It might have been her not wanting to cause issues while they didn’t know how much time they’d have to spend together, but all Shuichi could think about until he fell asleep to the sounds of the rain and Kaede’s gentle breathing was that she secretly wanted nothing to do with him, and everything that she’d said and done was a lie. He regularly rubbed elbows with liars, but they tended to be much more up-front about their lack of honesty; how much did she think she was going to get away with by lying about how she felt? She seemed like she had no intentions of giving him the truth, and he couldn’t let her know what he’d heard, so things were going to be at an impasse until she said something she couldn’t recover from.

That hypothetical moment didn’t come in the following days, though, as they learned how to handle their current lifestyle and the strange quirks there were to it. The lobby never emptied and always seemed to be more bustling every time they went down into it, whether it was for meals or for Kaede to spend time playing the piano, and even after the rain finally cleared two days after the initial flooding it seemed that people were using the hotel as their safe rally point. She didn’t seem to care about all of the extra attention and praise she was given with her impromptu performances, and he kept a close eye on her every time she played just to maintain his role as her guardian, but nothing out of the ordinary every seemed to happen to them during those first few days.

If being stuck sharing a room at a hotel with someone who’d been a stranger and who was withholding some kind of secret grudge against him could be seen as “nothing out of the ordinary,” at any rate, but Shuichi was mostly glad that nothing else had gone wrong. As long as things managed to stay peaceful and calm, that was what mattered—until he was finally called back from his workplace and given some insight onto what kind of nonsense had been happening there.


	3. Downpour

Usually on weekends the station was a bustling place, but with every detective who was even remotely associated with the place out for the time being, things were much quieter than normal. If it were under any other circumstances Maki wouldn’t have minded the silence so much but seeing as she was trapped in the cell without any way out and with only having her coworkers to rely on, she almost wished that there were a million things happening there to distract her instead. Her one, reliable companion almost all the time was Himiko, who would run various errands for her to keep things going smoothly, and even though it was expressly prohibited she would bring a friend with her almost every time she came in.

Now, Maki couldn’t say too many bad things about Himiko, especially not once she looked past the crippling laziness and bored expressions she always wore, but some of her friends were a lot to handle, even for someone who had to speak to them through a door. “I’m telling you, I could bust this door down in five seconds flat,” Tenko said, upon being brought with Himiko the first time she possibly could. “It can’t be that hard to break open, doors are meant to open after all.”

“Oh yes, because we’re going to put criminals on the other side of a door that they could easily smash the lock on to get open. Brilliant idea. That’s why you’re not one of us, because you think like that.” Sounding irritated with the stupidity she was hearing, Maki gave Himiko an _are you serious about bringing her?_ look that was immediately, slowly shrugged at. “Get her out of here, Himiko, before she breaks something and we can’t manage to blame it on Kokichi because he’s still not here.”

“About that,” Himiko started, looking at Tenko and how she seemed to be feigning being offended at what she’d just been told about herself. “I may have said to Kokichi that what he did was not okay and that he should stay home until he fixes the problem. He was only gonna make things worse if he kept coming around, you know. So I told him, stay home or fix everything! And he said…he’s gonna stay home because he can’t fix things.”

“That sounds exactly like something you’d do, and exactly like his expected response. Can’t anyone around here have any brain cells for five minutes?” It wasn’t exactly fair for Maki to react like that, seeing as her initial reaction to being trapped inside the unbreakable cell had been to kick the door and injure her foot (which still throbbed whenever she put weight on it, and had been swollen to the point of her being unable to keep her shoe on). But it was ridiculous that Himiko had taken that sort of action without running it by her, even though it _was_ amazing that Himiko had acted at all. “Now it’s literally just you here to do things if someone calls in. Are you prepared to deal with that?”

Himiko froze, before shaking her head, but Tenko jumped in with words of encouragement for her companion. “Of course she’s prepared to deal with it, she’s a superstar when it comes to doing her job! Why else is she still employed here, if she’s not good at what she does?”

“There’s a lot of reasons why that would be. Almost as many as there are for why Kokichi’s still here, even though he’s a colossal piece of shit who can’t be a decent human being for one weekend.” The response felt scalding, and Tenko seemed to recoil at it, but Himiko didn’t seem bothered to hear what was said to her by the person acting over her head at the moment. “Thankfully we haven’t had any calls yet, but there’s no telling how long I’m going to be in here, and so you might get unlucky and have to do some real work.”

“I can do real work!” Himiko declared, stomping one foot into the ground. “I’m just as good as getting to the bottom of things as you are, you’re just being mean to me!”

“Maybe that’s all she’s good for right now,” Tenko said, trying to diffuse the situation she’d had a hand in making worse. “Besides, what kinds of things are you going to have to do in this kind of weather? No one’s going to be committing crimes when the world’s flooding.”

Now it was Maki’s turn to recoil at what was said, having not realized that there had been any sort of rain event going on in the world around her. “What do you mean, when the world’s flooding? I thought there were going to be some storms outside of town, but that’s all I ever heard anything about.” The next several minutes were spent with Tenko, and occasionally Himiko, catching her up to speed on the weather situation outside the station’s walls, a story that Maki realized quickly she didn’t actually want to hear. If the weather was as bad as they were claiming, then the likelihood of either of the people she knew had keys to the cell door coming back on schedule was slim to none.

Which meant that she was going to have to hope like hell that Kokichi had been lying about taking Kaito’s key from him, and that when he came back from his weekend off he’d be able to let her out with a goofy smile and probably some cheesy inspirational quote he’d seen on a poster one time. Admitting that she was going to need to believe in Kaito’s ability to not believe a word that Kokichi said was never going to happen, because the second anyone knew that, regardless of if they knew Kaito or not, she was never going to hear the end of it. All she could do right then was put on a brave face and act like none of this that she’d just learned had changed a thing, and neither of the ladies she was speaking with seemed to catch on to the fact that she’d had such a realization.

The combination of Himiko and Tenko may not have noticed it, but when Himiko brought in someone different to keep her and Maki company there in the station, that someone else was quick to take a guess on where Maki’s mind was at the moment. “Thinking about your lover boy, aren’t you?” Miu asked, pushing her face up against the door and speaking oddly un-crudely for herself. That changed almost immediately when Maki’s whole face scrunched up at the name that she’d used for Kaito, seemingly giving Miu the answer she was looking for. “Ha, you totally are! What a loser, locked in a cell and all you can fantasize about is getting raw-dogged by some guy who probably actually hates your guts!”

“I can tell you from personal experience that Kaito doesn’t hate me, thanks, and even if—”

“She didn’t say who she was talking about.” Himiko put on a thoughtful look, her finger pressed against her chin as she seemed to have noticed a flaw in what Maki had said before anyone else did. “So maybe you _have_ been thinking about him, haven’t you?”

“—no, I really haven’t. I’m just used to everyone and their grandmother accusing me of being in love with him, so it’s kind of a natural reaction now.” She was trying to save face as best as she could, but the truth as everyone knew it was that Maki really had been thinking about Kaito, and what he could’ve done for her in the situation in the case that Kokichi had been doing what he did best and lying. She’d had to put up with so much stuff because of her potential feelings for him that she worked hard to mask them, and it was in situations like that where her masking got her in more trouble that made her wonder if keeping up the charade was worth it. So what if he found out how she felt, because he was too dense to really do anything with the information.

Unfortunately for her, she’d made the mistake of keeping up that charade in the presence of one vulgar-mouthed Miu, who was slyly grinning from ear to ear at hearing the denial. “No way, I know when a bitch is lying when I hear it and you’ve got that stench all over you. You’re so thirsty for him, which I don’t get but whatever, you do you and do what makes your pussy happy.”

“Please, can you shut up for two seconds and stop being nasty? I don’t have any feelings towards him aside from…” Maki had to stop to think about the best way that she could word how she felt about Kaito that wouldn’t lead to more questions. “Aside from putting up with him whenever I have to see his dumb face around here. That’s it. Nothing else.”

“I already told you, you’ve got that stench all over you, you’re getting soggy between the legs just talking about him!” To illustrate her point, Miu inhaled deeply, coughing dramatically once she’d taken the breath in for a few seconds as she exhaled it with flourish. “Come on, just admit to it, then we can work to push the two of you together when we get the chance.”

“Not interested, but thank you anyway.”

Reminding them both that she was, in fact, paying attention to what was going on around her, Himiko said, “That’s how she always reacts when someone says they’ll help her get with him. I don’t think she really means it. Or maybe she really doesn’t want to be with him. I don’t know, I’ve never been in that situation.”

“It’s totally the first option, she’s so desperate for a piece of that man that she’s basically drooling just having to talk about him!” Miu gave a harsh laugh, the sound of which initially reminded Maki of how Kokichi would laugh about anything similar, before she remembered that he was currently out of her hair and that she didn’t need to worry about him. “You’ve got to step up as her wing-woman, Himiko! Get in there and hook them up!”

“But that doesn’t sound like what Maki wants. I’m not the best at forcing people to do stuff, I just kinda…let them do what they want.” Himiko looked at Maki, who was switching who she was glaring daggers at. “Yeah, I’m not gonna force her to do it. Sorry, Miu.”

“Then if you’re not going to do it, I will! Where’s his phone number, I’m gonna call him right now and give him a piece of my mind and tell him to get over here!” Slamming her hands together, Miu met Maki’s glare and responded to it with a wink. “I’m sure he’s small enough that he can fit himself in through the food slot there on the door. You and him can have some private time, all thanks to this fabulous woman genius right here!”

There were several things wrong with what Miu said, and Maki didn’t know where to even begin with any of them, but she did have one specific thing to say on the matter. “If you call that man and get him in here on his weekend off, I’m going to add you to the list of people to murder once I’m out of here, and that’s a promise.”

“Wh-whoa there, isn’t that excessive?” Switching from her boastful self to a more subdued one, Miu finally flinched from her stare-down with Maki, beginning to cower next to Himiko even though nothing had been done to warrant the behavior. “I’m just trying to help a sister out, give her something to look forward to in life. You’d do the same for me if I had a guy I was into, wouldn’t you?”

Rolling her eyes, Maki immediately replied, “Yeah, sure, except there’s not a man I’m into, so you’re just barking up the wrong tree here. Get lost, Miu, all you’re doing is making a mess for yourself that you don’t want to clean up.” There was some sputtering of retorts but Miu quickly heeded the command to leave, Himiko going with her for whatever reason. Maki didn’t exactly want to be alone there at the station yet again, but she preferred the silence to having to listen to Miu’s nonsense, and so if she was given silence, she was going to take it.

Being alone for so long made for a perfect amount of preparation time for when the weekend was over and the man they’d talked and argued so much about came back to work. The first thing that Kaito did when he showed up every day was holler into the building that he was there, seeing if anyone else was around, and when Maki heard it she tried her best to stay completely silent. If she didn’t have him knowing that she was locked in the cell, she could get around having to talk to him for as long as possible, which meant avoiding any of the awkwardness that conversations with him typically entailed. Hoping that she’d get lucky in that regard was dangerous, but she didn’t have much of a choice because she really did not want to have to talk to him.

But Kaito had a way of ending up right where he needed to be there at the station, whether he was wanted or not, and he came up to the cell’s door with bounding steps, shoving a package in through the slot. “Mail delivery, Maki Roll! Rise and shine, it’s time for another day of work!” he greeted, in time with the package hitting the floor and her limping over to get it, grumbling about how she didn’t care for that nickname, even if it was him addressing her with it. “Now if only I knew where my key was, then I’d get ya right out of there. But Kokichi said it’d be on my desk when I got back, and it’s not there. I checked a couple times, didn’t see it. Any ideas?”

“Yeah, you dumbass, he took it from you just to intentionally lock me in here. So…thanks for doing that, you made my weekend simply fantastic.” She felt like she was spitting venom with those words, but her calling Kaito negative names was just as common as him calling her Maki Roll, and he was quite used to hearing it. “I’ve got no idea where he put the key, and he said he’s not coming back until I’m let out of this, so that means we wait until Kyoko’s back in town, or until Shuichi gets back, and who knows which one’s sooner.”

“You’ve been in here all weekend? Kokichi told me it was just for the night, that lying piece of—hey, wait a second! If you’ve been locked up all weekend, that means you don’t know about the storm yet, huh?” While Kaito’s realization of what kind of news Maki had missed over the weekend hit him, she was left staring at him with an almost confused expression on her face. She nodded, unsure of if that was the answer he wanted or not, and he put his hand over his face, shaking his head side to side a few times. “Oh no, that’s not good then. Sorry that I’ve gotta be the one to break this to ya, but neither of them are gettin' back anytime soon, that we know of.”

“And why, exactly, would that be?” she asked, still not connecting the dots he was trying to draw for her because of how obscenely idiotic they seemed.

“Because of the storm? I already asked ya if you’d heard about it!” His hand slid down his face until he’d unobscured it, staring her down with a serious, yet somewhat goofy, look that only confused her further, especially as he started to play with the hair that made up his little goatee on his chin. “They’re kinda stuck wherever they are, which I don’t even know where my ol’ sidekick is because he hasn’t bothered tellin’ me anything, but if he made it out to the city he’s not leavin’ for at least a week, and Kyoko’s just kinda not coming back for that long anyway because of whatever it is she’s out there doin’.”

That was an explanation that Maki hadn’t wanted to hear, and she loudly groaned when she caught on to the fact that he was being completely serious despite his manner of delivery. “I can’t believe this, Kokichi’s a little rat who trapped me in here for shits and giggles and ended up locking me in a cell for at least a _week_?”

“Seems that way, if the people on the news haven’t been getting over-the-top with how they’re reporting on this.” His hand slowly stopping its fidgeting, Kaito came closer to the door, blinking slowly as he looked around the cell that Maki was currently calling home despite doing nothing to deserve it. “I’m sure that Kokichi’s got that key somewhere around here, though, there’s no way he’d lose that and get me in trouble.”

“Trust me, he’s looking for trouble for someone, but that person in particular would be himself. He thinks he’s getting away with this, he’s got another thing coming.” Maki was trying not to look too closely at Kaito, but she needed a distraction because she knew getting him to leave her alone wasn’t going to be easy. The package he’d delivered made for a perfect thing to focus on instead, and she crouched down to pick it up, noticing that it was addressed to her at the station’s address. “Wait, did you know I was in here from the moment you walked in, or was it a guess or something?”

“Saw your car outside, knew that you’d have told me to shut up if you were tryin’ to work, made a pretty good guess as to where I could find ya. Just…I thought that you’d be in there cleaning it, not locked up, so that part was a big surprise.” As for what was inside the package, he could only shrug, telling her that she needed to open it to see what it was, because he had no idea at all.

“You’re such a bad liar,” she told him as she opened the package, hearing the way his voice had slightly cracked when he’d mentioned not knowing what was inside what he’d given her. “I know that you’re the one responsible for whatever this is, and I’d like you to tell me before I open it up.”

He raised both hands defensively, spitting out, “I don’t know a thing, Maki Roll! It was just sittin’ out front when I got here, so I did ya a favor and brought it to you! Can’t a man do nice things for a lady he works with without getting grilled for it?”

“Sure, but he should also own up to the truth about those nice things he’s doing.” It was moments like this where Maki fully understood why people were so certain that the two of them had something for each other, because there she was, in the middle of one of the worst situations of her life, opening a package that contained nothing but a small stuffed bear with her name stitched into the sweater it was wearing, which happened to also have a red heart on the front. Her first reaction was to grimace at the overwhelming cuteness, then it was to groan inwardly about how that gift in particular was not going to help everyone’s opinion about them at all, and finally she looked at him with a glare in her eyes to attempt to thank him for the gift. “Did it really _need_ to be a heart?”

“It was either that or a flower, and I figured you’d like the red more than the pink that would’ve been. So now you’ve got yourself a little buddy for whenever you’re driving alone at night, and it’s all thanks to some dashing stranger.” He playfully winked at her, making her narrow her glare a bit more in an attempt to point out that he’d already admitted that he was the one who’d gotten her the gift. “Just say you like it and let’s move on, Maki Roll, there’s so much I’ve gotta ask you about what happened to put you in there.”

She tossed aside the packaging the bear had been in, deciding that she’d let the little thing stick around for a while, and she hobbled towards the bed to lay it next to the paper-thin pillow she’d been forced to use to sleep. “I guess I like it enough to not throw it away, so there’s that as a review,” she replied, turning on her good foot to see Kaito looking at her with an unsure look in his eyes, as if her response wasn’t what he wanted. “Oh, do you want me to say I love it? Because I don’t.”

“No, it’s just…what happened to your other foot? You’re limping really badly, did the bed fall over on ya or something while you were in there? I know it does that sometimes.” He sounded truly concerned about what had happened, and Maki knew that trying to let that go unnoticed would not work in her favor, so she heaved a sigh and broke into the explanation of how she’d gotten locked in the cell in the first place, and how in her anger over that she’d managed to injure her foot or ankle to some extent. The whole time she spoke he was nodding along, even though she was certain none of her words were actually sticking with him, and when she finished he put on a pensive look, tapping his fingertips together as he processed all the information that he could. “That sounds like you should get that looked at as soon as you’re outta there. And _that_ sounds like I’ve really gotta find that key so that we can get the door open for you.”

“Finding the key is something that’s going to happen between you and Kokichi, because I can’t do anything in here and he’s not going to listen to anyone anyway so I’m not even going to bother suggesting asking Himiko for help. You’re the dipshit who decided to believe he was going to use the key for good while you were gone, you’re the one who can clean up that mess.” It felt nice for Maki to be able to command the source of her problems around a bit, but Kaito seemed surprised at how bossy she was getting about things—even though he had literally just said that he needed to find the key. The problem seemed to come in the fact that he was fine with knowing that if he told himself to do it, but if she told him then he wasn’t quite as interested.

But there was no time to worry about his feelings on the matter, because what was most important was unlocking that door and giving her the freedom she rightfully deserved; it was a long-shot that anything was going to happen but she had to believe that if anyone could make a miracle occur, it would be the always-positive one who boasted about how he made the impossible happen every day. By the end of the long day, which was spent with her lounging around in the cell and him scouring every possible corner of the station, he’d not found any traces of the key and was convinced it was gone, and with that in mind he had one solution to act on. “I’ve gotta make a call real quick,” he told her, when they were back on their respective sides of the cell door, him looking somewhat apologetic and her looking completely unamused. “It’s the only way I think we’re gonna get to the bottom of this.”

“Have fun asking Kokichi where he hid the key,” she replied, not caring to watch his reaction and therefore not noticing that he attempted to refute that statement, giving up when he saw that she was heading back to the bed to lay down and forget about things for a while. She was beyond done with the entire situation for the moment, and was pushing it into the hands of the person with the second-most amount of responsibility for things happening as they did.

When he did go back to his desk to make the call he’d mentioned, Kaito didn’t bother trying to track down whatever phone number Kokichi might’ve been using that week, nor did he simply sit in his chair and forget about what he’d said. He picked up the receiver, pushing in numbers that he was familiar with on a personal level and hit to dial the call, and when the person on the other end answered he merely started with, “Uh, hey there sidekick, I’ve got a bit of a problem you’ve gotta hear me out on.”

* * *

There was a typical hierarchy to the phone system at the station, in terms of who it was that was using the phone to make outgoing calls. The most likely to be calling someone was Shuichi himself, but those calls came from his personal office phone and were in response to investigations already in progress. Next came whichever other senior detective was there at the station that particular day, whether it was Kyoko or Shuichi’s uncle, and those too came from the private phone. After them came Maki, Kokichi, and Himiko in that order, because they would occasionally call wherever it was that they were expected to go to try and scout things out a bit. And then last, and least, was Kaito, who despite being the station’s acting secretary of sorts, never really had a reason to be calling anyone.

So when Shuichi answered his phone with the long-awaited call from the station to hear Kaito’s voice on the other end, he immediately knew that some sort of trouble had happened that he was now getting let in on. He glanced around the hotel room, which was empty for the moment as Kaede was in the lobby putting on another piano performance that he felt comfortable letting her be at by herself, before settling into the desk chair with his flip phone against his ear. “What kind of problem could you possibly have, the station’s not taking any investigations while I’m out, remember? Did you try booking me to be somewhere that I can’t even get to?”

“No, it’s not that,” Kaito said, scratching the back of his neck as he thought about how he was going to present the problem at hand. “It’s not even something I did, ‘cause I wasn’t here this weekend either. So I might’ve given Kokichi my key to the cell in case they needed it while we were all out, and he closed the door to the cell and lost the key somewhere.”

“That’s a problem I can solve when I get back, whenever that is. You…know I’m stuck right now because of the flooding, don’t you?” Of all the things that Shuichi expected to hear next, the words _yeah, but Maki’s stuck in there and I can’t get her out_ were not anywhere close to the list, and just hearing them made Shuichi’s stomach clench. “O-oh, yeah, that is a problem you’ve got there. You’re sure he lost your key?”

He could hear the hesitant pause on the other side, followed with, “Nah, I haven’t actually talked to him since he asked for the key in the first place. It was Maki Roll who said he lost it, since she’s the one that’s trapped and all. I’m allowed to call someone in to break her out if you can’t do it, right?”

“No way! Kaito, I know that you want to help her, but we can’t afford for that cell door to be broken, if it’s broken all of you are out of a job and I’m going back to working at Kyoko’s station. She’s just going to have to survive, somehow. You guys are feeding her, correct?” The thought of losing his independence and returning to working at the station he’d broken away from when he was given the chance was worrying to Shuichi, but at the same time he was worried for one of the people that he employed to help him out. When Kaito told him that as far as he was aware they were feeding her, he felt a smidge better about things, but it was still worrisome to now have this on his shoulders as well as everything there at the hotel. “I just need you to keep her alive until I get back, or until Kyoko’s back, or until you manage to get Kokichi to give back the key, since I doubt he really lost it. I know Maki’s a strong woman and she can handle anything.”

“You’re right, but…I wanna get her out now. As my sidekick, I beg you to tell me how I can do that right now!” Kaito was sounding like he was getting desperate, even though he wasn’t the one that was in any sort of trouble, and it pained Shuichi to know that he had to keep turning him and his pleas down.

Things were made easier when the hotel room door came open and Kaede came in, humming a tune loudly that Shuichi could hear almost immediately. He let out a yelp of surprise and hung up his call without acknowledging or responding to what Kaito had demanded, but he didn’t want to have to explain why the pianist was still around when she should’ve been at her destination. “Those people down there are so polite when I say I’m done playing for the night,” Kaede said with a smile, locking the room’s door behind her before turning to see Shuichi tossing his phone aside, hearing it hit the floor. “Oh, what did I walk in to? Who was calling you?”

“None of your business,” he immediately replied, hoping that Kaito didn’t call him back now that Kaede was around. “It was work-related, which means it’s nothing you need to know about. Top-secret stuff.”

“I bet you were just talking to a friend, you’re getting awfully defensive for whatever it was, especially if it was just ‘work-related’.” Kaede made her way over to the bed, sitting down on the edge of it and lifting one foot up to undo her shoe, which was squeezing her foot rather tightly. “Ugh, I didn’t think that these things would shrink if they got wet, this is so stupid and I really liked them, too.”

Shuichi was glad that she’d moved on in her life without lingering too long on his mystery phone call, but what she said only raised more concerns. “What do you mean, your shoes shrunk when they got wet? What were you doing getting your shoes wet in the first place?”

“I went outside with some of the people in the lobby to go look and see the damage that we could see from where we are. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t a really smart idea, but we did it and…” She trailed off, rubbing her foot for a few seconds before switching to get the shoe off the other one. “I’m so ready to get to leave here, I’m kinda over being stuck in this place.”

“You and I both.” He could tell that something had rattled Kaede, based on how she was acting so strangely, but he wasn’t going to pry when he knew that she wasn’t the fondest of him. “Let’s just hope that it isn’t too much longer before they decide they can fly people out, because you need to get on with your life, and I need to get back to mine.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me,” she laughed, setting both feet flat on the floor and scrunching her toes a couple times to stretch them. While he could have told her that she was quite right with that assumption, he kept his mouth closed and merely smiled at her, but both of their expressions changed in a split-second when there was knocking at the door. She jumped up, heading towards the door but veering into the bathroom at the last moment, meaning that if anyone was going to see who was there, it was going to be Shuichi.

He got out of the chair and walked over, peering through the view-hole to see someone he didn’t recognize as a hotel worker standing on the other side. Making sure that the door was still locked and that it wouldn’t be able to be opened any further than he allowed it, he went against his better judgment and opened the door to tell the person on the other side to go away. “Can I help you?” he asked, taking a second look at the green-haired man on the other side who was standing with a bit of a fidget, playing with the sleeves of his long, striped shirt. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are and what you want, and we didn’t try ordering anything, so…”

“Wasn’t expecting there to be a man answering the door,” he replied, looking straight at Shuichi with half-lidded eyes that showed he was quite tired. “I thought I saw miss Akamatsu come up to this room, and I wanted to—”

“If you’re here to harass her because she’s famous, you can leave.” Shuichi was going to close the door on the man and put an end to it, but the man stuck out an arm, putting his fingers in the gap the door had while open. “Excuse me? I said, if you’re here to harass her, leave.”

“—I think there’s some kind of mistake. Which is fine, didn’t expect Kaede to really talk much about me.” The man withdrew his hand, but when Shuichi went to close the door again he put it right back. “Just let me talk to her, for two minutes. It’s nothing bad.”

“If she wanted to talk to you, I think she wouldn’t have decided to hide herself away rather than just go ahead and talk.” Shuichi considered going through closing the door anyway, but the legal issues that would arise from that sort of behavior were nothing he was interested in getting wrapped up in, and so he looked towards the closed bathroom door and cursed mentally at the woman inside of it. Of course she would leave him to deal with some rabid fan of hers, rather than even give him a hint as to what was going on.

That, or she was planning something else, as evidenced by how she came out of the bathroom moments later, a fresh coat of makeup on her face and her hair brushed neatly behind her shoulders. “Okay, I’m ready to talk to him now, thanks for being a distraction,” she said to Shuichi, motioning for him to get out of the way so she could take his place at the door. “Hey there, Rantaro. Long time no see, am I right?”

“Certainly. May I come in? There’s a lot we’ve missed out on since the last time we spoke, like whoever the guy you’re in there with is.” Almost immediately the demeanor of the man on the other side of the door lightened up, and Kaede didn’t seem to be unfamiliar with him at all. In fact, when she unlocked the door to let him come inside, the first thing they did when they were able to was share a quick hug, Kaede apologizing for the mess and the stranger that was in the room with them while they chatted. “It’s no problem, you know I’m used to talking to people in weird places. Better here in front of him than at the place I’ve been stuck staying in all of this.”

“Where’s that?” Kaede asked, tilting her head and ignoring the blank look that Shuichi was giving her for her behavior. “I wasn’t even aware you were anywhere near here, I totally would’ve invited you up here sooner if I’d known!”

The man—Rantaro, that was what she’d called him—shrugged as he sat down on the floor, letting his legs sit straight in front of himself. “Just a house right outside of the flooding. Today’s the first day that we’ve left the house, all of us who were staying there. Figured I’d come up to the hotel to see what was happening, wasn’t expecting to see your face here. What’s a performer like you doing in a place like this?”

“Getting stopped while trying to get to my next concert, that’s what. Shuichi was driving me, since he was headed that way as well, but the bridge being out and the roads collapsing kind of ruined our plans entirely.” She blinked, shuddering in surprise when she abruptly looked towards Shuichi, who had turned his attention towards the muted news on the television. “Say, Shuichi, why don’t you join our conversation? I promise you that Rantaro’s a good guy, he’s a longtime friend of mine who travels around the world!”

“Not really interested,” he quickly replied, not wanting to leave any opening for doubt to take in his mind. He certainly would listen to their conversation, but he wanted no part of it for himself, and Kaede would have to understand that. “You two can catch up or whatever you plan on doing, but I’m fine being left out.”

She groaned for a second before shaking off his rejection, looking back at Rantaro with a smile. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you. He’s always like this, has been since we first met and hasn’t changed at all.”

“Sounds like a tough nut to crack. How did you end up sharing a room with this guy?” Rantaro’s curious question invited Kaede to explain the whole story from beginning to end, in as much detail as she could manage, all while Shuichi had to hold in his judgments and not interject to correct her misgivings. She was fairly reliable at recounting their tale of woe, but there were parts that she embellished to make him seem worse than he was (particularly when it came to them finding the bridge that had been swept away, as she made it sound like they discovered it by driving off of it), and Rantaro was doing nothing but eating the whole thing up. His nods and murmurs showed that he was following the entire thing, and when she got to the end with a dramatic arm-flail, he sat a bit straighter up on the floor. “That’s a lot you’ve had going on there, Kaede. Surprised I haven’t heard more about this sooner.”

“I don’t know why you would have wanted to hear about any of this, it’s not exactly the most exciting stuff, not when so many other people are going through the same things.” At least Kaede was able to recognize that what she was going through was not exclusive to her, or even to the people in the room with her, but that was a small victory in the grand scheme of the world. “I just want to get out of here and get back to my real life, but I guess I’m not the only one who wants to do that. Isn’t that right, Shuichi?”

Hearing his name be brought out again struck him by surprise, and Shuichi had to figure out what it was that he was expected to say before he put his foot in his mouth and said something dumb. “I mean, that would be correct, but what your ‘real life’ means and what mine means are two very different things.”

While she nodded and agreed with that statement, Rantaro wasn’t quite sure how to take it, and expressed that concern almost immediately. “Is that a dig at how she makes a living on being a pianist? Would you come after me the same way if you knew I traveled the world on my family’s dime?”

“Uh, no, not at all!” Shuichi quickly replied, cursing himself for still managing to put his foot in his mouth anyway. “What I meant was that I was going somewhere important—ugh, no, Kaede’s concert was important to her too—I mean that I’m a detective and there was a crime and…you know what? Just forget it.”

“And so the pianist ended up sharing a room with a detective, despite knowing that she shouldn’t. How interesting.” There was an amused tone to Rantaro’s voice, but Shuichi was so flustered and shamed about how badly he’d seemed to have messed up that he didn’t dare say anything about it. Instead, he chose to leave the room, making sure he had a key on him before stepping out with nothing more than a statement that he’d be back eventually to the pair still in there.

While he paced the halls of the hotel, all Shuichi could think about was how strange of a position he’d ended up in, and how badly it was going to reflect on him when everyone inevitably found out about things. He didn’t know this Rantaro guy at all, and he barely knew Kaede, and as far as he was aware the two of them were going to run his name through the mud as an awkward and incompetent detective once they were all out of the town. He was never going to be able to get a job on any cases outside of Kibou again, he was certain, and it would all be because of this one little incident where he hadn’t had any control over anything except his own mouth. Adding in the fact that it seemed to be common enough knowledge that Kaede didn’t even _like_ detectives and it was just a recipe for disaster where Shuichi himself was the key ingredient, and he hadn’t wished more to go home and call everything over than right then.

By the time he made it back to the room, over an hour had passed and he was feeling more miserable than he had when he’d initially left. That only made him stand staring at the door for a while, debating whether or not it was even worth it to go back inside, before biting the bullet and unlocking the door anyway, going in to a room that had all of the belongings it had before, but none of the people. “Where’d she go off to this time?” he asked himself, closing the door and checking to see if her clothes were all still there. They were, which meant that she at least intended on coming back and not wandering off with her friend, even though he halfheartedly wished that she would at that point. Only halfheartedly, though, because he still knew that she was his responsibility until she made it to her destination, and if she got wrapped up in other things and something bad happened, the blame would fall squarely on his shoulders.

The longer he sat around waiting for her to get back, the stronger the wish that she wouldn’t return grew, despite him knowing all-too-well how he couldn’t dwell on that kind of thought in their particular situation. She needed to return to the room and all of her belongings, or else he’d have another problem on his hands, that being that he’d have her things but not her to show for it. That was definitely not anything he needed in his life, even though he was fine with her not being around, and so he had to sit there and wait patiently for her return.

Her opening the door came after he’d given up on waiting and had laid down in bed, tucking himself under the blankets as they’d previously arranged, and he heard her enter but made no effort to make sure that it really was her. She tried her best to sneak around the room to not disturb him, but every step she took resulted in her bumping into something or other, and by the time she’d changed into her pajamas and was getting into bed, Shuichi was back to being completely awake and aware of what was happening in the room. “I can feel how cold you are through the sheet, where were you?” he asked her, not actually interested in the answer but curious as to know how she’d managed to make herself feel like an ice cube. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, but I would like to know.”

“I was just outside talking to Rantaro for a while, before he walked back to where he’s staying, and it got a lot colder than I was expecting it to while we were out there. You should’ve seen the sky, there were so many stars than I usually get to see!” Even though she was speaking in a whisper, there was excitement in Kaede’s voice that had her volume ticking up slightly, before she brought it back down with, “But I know that you and Rantaro really didn’t get to know each other, so maybe it’s for the best that you weren’t out there with us, stars or no stars.”

“I’ve gone stargazing enough to know what a full sky looks like,” he replied, thinking about being home and going out at night to watch the stars with Kaito, who enjoyed doing that more than just about anything. “Glad you got to experience it for yourself, though. Must’ve been a real treat.”

She vibrated for a moment while laying there, before rolling over and nearly pressing her face right into Shuichi’s, him not expecting what she was doing until it was too late to miss her. “It was such a great time. That guy’s one of my best friends, and the only one I’ve got outside of the music industry. Can you imagine what it’s like to just end up running into him in this kind of place? What are the odds, right?”

“At least one of us had some sort of luck here.”

“What are you saying? We both got lucky all sorts of times during this trip. I mean, what if there hadn’t been any rooms left here? What if we’d been on the road when the landslides wiped out those areas? What about the bridge, we could’ve been on it when it fell!” Kaede’s grin was visible even in the darkened room, thanks to how Shuichi’s eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, and he couldn’t help but feel motivated by her optimism to crack a smile himself. “Sure, some bad things happened and we weren’t always lucky, but at the end of the day? Luck was totally on our side for all of this.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he conceded, hoping she couldn’t see how his smile had grown bigger. “I’m just thinking about all of the negatives that I never stop to look at what good things happened to us, and there were quite a few. I guess that the luckiest thing of all was that this happened with us together, because I’m not sure going through this alone would have been very easy.” He was speaking out of kindness, having accepted that Kaede may not personally like him but she certainly made things easier to handle, but the way she giggled at his words made him think that she understood where he was coming from.

That all changed with her next sentence, which turned the warming air between them back to the same frigid breeze it had always been: “So I guess then you’ll be fine when I get to leave tomorrow, huh?”

“You get to…what?” He hadn’t heard a thing about anyone leaving beyond the rough initial timetable, so her saying that shook him to the core. “Since when was that happening? How are they managing it?”

“I don’t know the details, but that’s what I was told on my way back upstairs once Rantaro left. I guess they’re gonna helicopter me and a couple others out? But I don’t know when, or who else, or anything.” She sighed, her happiness fading quickly. “I kinda wish you get to come with me, Shuichi, just for being such a nice guy during all of this.”

“They’d have let me know by now if I was, I’m sure,” he told her, his mind racing with all of the possibilities of what was about to transpire. If she was being airlifted out without him, that meant she wasn’t his responsibility anymore, which meant he didn’t have to think about her a second longer once she was strapped in. The thought was nice, but he wanted to finish what he’d started by driving her to the hotel in the first place, and this was denying him that opportunity; he couldn’t dwell on that, though, not when she had things to get back to. “I’m happy for you, but at the same time I’m sad that I’ll be here still for a while.”

She gave a solemn laugh, much different from her earlier giggle. “I’m sure you’ll be out of here soon, too, you just have to stay positive about things! And once you’re able to go places on your own, you should totally come to one of my shows. I’ll get you free tickets, you just say the word and I’ll do it.”

They fell asleep not long after that, those words being the last ones they exchanged that night, and when morning came Kaede’s statement was proven to be true as the hotel workers had to come up to the room to wake her up, to tell her to pack her belongings and head outside. Shuichi tagged along to help her carry everything, and when she got on the small plane that could barely carry her, her things, and the other passengers who were also desperate to leave, he didn’t have time to say goodbye or hear her thanks for his assistance. Their last moments together were spent rushing to get her out of the hotel and back on the road for her piano concerts, and all he could think about as he watched the plane take off from the makeshift runway was that he’d need to take her up on her offer sometime.

That was a decision made out of the same kindness as every other gesture he’d tried to show her, and one that just felt right given what they’d shared. They’d done nothing to get to know each other better, and in fact had seemed to only drift further apart than they’d started, but he could at least hold the olive branch and be there to support her in something that she enjoyed doing. His decision was only further solidified when he went back to the room and found one of her dresses laying across the bed, discarded without her realizing it, and he knew that if anything, he needed to get that back to her. It was a mission that would take time—and going to one of her concerts a week after he’d been able to get home from the whole ordeal and fix all of the problems waiting for him there had _not_ been the appropriate time or place to try fixing it—but Shuichi was not going to let the dress become something that he had of hers that she still wanted. He was going to get it back to her, one way or another.

If only he’d known that the way it happened was unlike anything he could have ever imagined happening to him, in a world post-being trapped at a hotel due to flooding.


	4. Soaking

There was a lot that could be said about what happened over the course of six weeks, but the biggest thing about it all was that nothing really changed from how it had been before the rainstorm had hit. Shuichi was still focused altogether too much on his work, and he was still working with people who weren't quite cut out for his line of work--and the ine person who was had a whole list of other problems she was focusing on during that span of time.

As it turned out, Maki had managed to break several bones in her foot and ankle with that kick to the door in her anger, and because of being held captive as she was they had managed to heal incorrectly. That meant that she had to get them re-broken if she wanted any chance at walking correctly again, rather than with the limp she had gotten used to, and because walking with the limp was incredibly painful and humiliating (in her opinion), the decision was made that she would go through the process to fix it. But the first available appointment for that was six weeks after her visit to the doctor about the pain in the first place, and that meant six weeks of not being able to do her actual job.

She was too valuable of an asset to the station to let sit unused for so long, so Shuichi and Kyoko came up with a plan to keep her working but not doing her sneaking and investigating that she typically did. Of course, there was an alterior motive to the solution they arrived at, and the moment Maki realized she was going to be sharing a desk and a workspace with the very man that everyone accused her of having something for, she was beyond furious. But the truth always had been that she _did_ feel something for Kaito, and so the arrangement worked out in her favor in that regard, even if she refused to admit it until she was getting a bit too close to him during a station meeting.

Things in Kibou may have managed to ultimately stay pretty close to the same over those six weeks, but for the country-traveling pianist it wasn't quite the case. Ever since she'd left the hotel in the flooded town, Kaede had found herself thinking over and over again about the detective who'd shown her such kindness and put up with so much nonsense in their time together, and she almost regretted not exchanging any information with him beyond his name. Sure, she knew where it was that he worked, but she couldn't exactly waltz into a police-owned detective office and demand to see their main investigator, not without causing some sort of trouble for herself or for him. Naturally she was more worried about her own image in the whole ordeal rather than his, but she couldn't afford to be accused of illegal things that led her to going to visit a detective.

The last thing Kaede really wanted, or needed, in her life was to be accused of doing things that warranted legal counsel, and that was what stopped her most from going to the station herself. She could handle the fans having a huge misconception in their minds, but if her father found out about her going there, much less the reason for it, she only feared the worst could happen. Her father's disdain for the police and anyone associated with them was justifiable enough, but it was clearly in the way of her getting done something she felt needed to happen in order for her life to move on. That, of course, was go talk to Shuichi and tell him all about how he hadn't left her mind in their time apart, how he seemed so interesting to her as soon as she didn't have unlimited access to him. He'd been a difficult nut to crack there at the hotel, so she felt maybe things would be different on his own home turf.

Six weeks was all it took for her to decide that she couldn't live with herself if she never took the leap and talked to him again, and so she was determined to get through to him the next time that she was back in Kibou. There were breaks in her touring schedule that gave her a chance to pop back home, to visit her parents and catch up with them, and it was on one of those return visits that she decided she was going to march into the station and not leave until she'd talked to the detective again.

There were many flaws to her plan, none that Kaede actually realized existed until she was trying to make things happen. She hadn't quite thought about how she'd get to the station, other than asking her parents for a ride, and she couldn't find anywhere near it that she could reasonably need to go. Just imagining the look of hatred and despair in her father's eyes at mentioning where she wanted to visit was not anything she was fond of doing, but she couldn't help the fact that she was smitten with a detective. And so she decided that she would call a taxi instead and have them discreetly drive her over to the station, to avoid having to bring up the topic with her father at all. It had never crossed her mind that he’d somehow hear about it through word of mouth, or from the media, given that she was as famous as she was, but her intentions were pure and she didn’t mean to offend him.

What she did mean to have happen was a nice, long conversation with the man she’d shared a bed with for several nights without really getting to know him, even if it meant dropping in on him unannounced while at work. She was able to secure a ride easily and get to the station without any questions asked, but it was from the moment she walked inside the front door that things went very much against the plan she’d been hoping for. Sitting at the front desk of the building was an angry-looking woman who was giving her a no-nonsense look, and she assumed that she could just walk up to her, tell her she needed to talk to Shuichi, and get on with things.

Maki didn’t play like that, though, not when she was doing a job she wasn’t the most familiar with and was currently spending the most time up at the desk by herself she ever had in her life. “Sorry, but he’s not in right now. He’s doing real work,” she said after Kaede asked to speak with the detective who typically would’ve been present. “Not like you know what real work is, huh? Being a pianist and all that, bet you don’t have to do much more than press your keys and smile big and pretty.”

“That’s totally not all I have to do, I’ll have you know!” It had been disheartening enough to hear that Shuichi wasn’t there, but for this stranger to then rip into her unexpectedly was not anything that Kaede had wanted. “I get that he’s got detective stuff to do, but I was really hoping that I could talk to him while I’m in town. It’s not every day that I’ve got a break from touring, after all.”

“Sounds like a personal problem to me,” Maki replied without changing her expression at all, unable to feign even an ounce of sympathy for Kaede. “You can just come back like everyone else who comes in here looking for him while he’s out. There’s your only option, now do it.”

Taking a sharp breath in at how rudely she was being treated, Kaede looked around to see if anyone else was present for the conversation, as a witness to this uncalled-for behavior. Finding that they seemed to be alone, she exhaled quickly and suggested, “Maybe you could do me a favor and give me his phone number, so that I can call him and talk to him? I know he has a phone, I saw him use it while we were together. That would get me out of here and…hey, why are you trying not to laugh at me?”

It was true, Maki’s cheeks had slightly puffed out as she was attempting to hold in a laugh as long as she could. She swallowed it down and coughed before she could give any sort of a reply to the suggestion. “Uh, because I’m not going to give his phone number out to anyone, maybe? If you want a number, you get the station number, but I’ll tell you right now that if you call it, you’re going to be left talking to me, and you’ll have the same conversation over the phone as you’re having right now.”

“This is incredibly unprofessional, how are you allowed to speak to me like this?” Kaede wasn’t even thinking in terms of her level of fame, she was thinking merely about how this woman was being so rude to her for what she felt was an innocent request. “All I want is to be able to call Shuichi and have a private conversation with him, which means I need a phone number that you can’t listen in on.”

“And that’s not happening, not right here from me. If you think I’m stupid enough to give his number out to someone who could sell it on the internet because of her ‘fame’, you’re delusional.” Maki had gone back to looking unamused and glaring in Kaede’s direction, while the blonde was trying not to cry in frustration at how things were going. “I don’t care if you’re upset by me turning you down, but welcome to the real world, piano princess.”

Somewhere else in the building they both heard a door slam shut, followed immediately by loud footsteps that culminated in someone else joining the conversation; while Kaede hoped it was Shuichi and that she’d been lied to about him not being present, it was instead some other man that gave her a once-over and immediately jumped to offer a hand to greet her. “Whoa there, Maki Roll, you didn’t tell me that we were being visited by music royalty today! I’ve gotta stop leaving you up here alone for so long, you have all the cool stuff happen while I’m gone!”

“I wasn’t planning on being visited by anyone,” Maki replied matter-of-factly, looking at the man with the same glare she’d been using on Kaede. “Besides, she’s not even here to see anyone but Shuichi, so does it even matter? All she’s doing is wasting her time, and wasting my breath for making me tell her that.”

Waving her negativity off, the man came closer towards Kaede, still offering her the hand that she hadn’t even considered taking. “There’s no reason for you to be so rude to our esteemed guest, you know! If she’s here to see Shuichi, why aren’t ya calling my sidekick up right now to bring him in?”

“Because he’s at an investigation, dumbass.” Checking herself out of the conversation as she stood up from her chair, Maki hobbled in the direction from which the man had just come, the sound of the boot she had to wear on her broken foot knocking into the ground with every step she took.

By the time she was out of range of being heard, Kaede had decided she was going to take the man’s hand and give it a delicate shake, but he tried squeezing it a bit harder than she expected and she was left yelping until he let go. “That hand is necessary for playing the piano, please don’t hurt me like that!” she explained, wiggling her fingers to test their functionality. “Anyway, you know who I am, so who are you?”

“Ah, right, a gentleman should introduce himself before shaking hands with someone like you. The name’s Kaito Momota, Luminary of the Stars…or, er, receptionist here at this station until I get a job with the space program.” Kaito flashed a goofy grin that made Kaede laugh in return, all of the hurt feelings she’d experienced being there before his appearance beginning to melt away. “Now I’ve gotta know, was Maki Roll being serious when she said that you’re here to see Shuichi? What’s a guy like that doing getting someone famous like you wanting to talk to him?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of what happened between me and him,” she replied, him taking a second to pull up memories of whatever Shuichi had told him previously about their situation, before nodding eagerly to prompt her to continue. “Well, I’ve been thinking about all of it a lot lately, and I just want to get to have a conversation with him about some of the things that happened. It’s mostly so I know that we’re on good terms and he doesn’t think of me as a high-maintenance diva or something like that.”

“He doesn’t think of you that way, I can tell ya that much,” Kaito assured her, not actually sure at all if what he was saying was true or if he was merely being polite to someone he’d just met. “Shuichi’s a hard one to crack, and honestly he meets so many people every day that I don’t really know if he thinks too much about any of ‘em.”

If Kaede had let her spirits rise at all that day, they had severely deflated and gotten trampled on at that news. “Oh, so you’re saying that we shared a _bed_ for days and he doesn’t remember who I am?” she asked to clarify, something that Kaito didn’t know how to respond to, based on his one-shouldered shrug that left her just as wordless as he was. The whole time, she’d figured that Shuichi would be at least interested in talking to her, but now that she didn’t know if he even remembered who she was, it added an interesting twist to the whole story. “I guess I wasted my time trying to come talk to him, huh? Thanks for letting me know that before I forced my way into his life again and came out with just as much closure about everything as I have now.” She was trying not to let the sting of this revelation affect her too much, but based on how her voice was wavering, she was not doing a very good job of things.

Kaito noticed this, and without asking her if it was okay or if she wanted the contact he grabbed her in a hug, hearing her chirp in surprise at the sudden contact with his strong arms. “I’m sure that if you did get to talk to him, he’d be over the moon gettin' to spend time with you again! Even if he’s pushed what happened between ya aside he’ll still remember who you are, he’d be stupid to forget meeting someone famous like you!”

“He did more than meet me, you know.” She knew that saying it like that could potentially open up a can of worms, but Kaito seemed to be too fixated on cheering her back up to notice the open-to-innuendo statement she’d made. Once he’d let go of her, and she was able to straighten out the sleeves on her shirt from where he’d crumpled them, she set off to explain herself about what she meant: “I mean, we shared a bed, we shared our whole lives there at that hotel for a few days. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close with someone that isn’t family in my whole life, and yet there we were, in that room, living together like we were supposed to be.”

“There weren’t any other options though, right? Like, that’s what Shuichi told me about it all, that you guys were either sleeping in the car or in the same room, and you made it work how you had to in order to survive.” It was somewhat obvious that Kaito hadn’t been told much beyond surface-level things, and Kaede wasn’t going to be the one to break him into the specific details of how they’d managed their stay, but he was trying his best to understand her perspective. “Here’s what you’ve gotta do, if you really wanna come talk to my sidekick. You’ve just gotta keep at it, he’s usually here and you just popped in at a bad time, so keep showing up and it’ll work! I promise that’s how it’ll be!”

As much as she wanted to believe in him, Kaede knew how difficult it had been to convince herself to put in the effort to get to the station one time, she had no idea how she’d manage to do it again in the future. But at the same time, Kaito seemed so confident in his statement that she felt like she’d been foolish not to believe in his words, and so she nodded, looking at him with eyes filled with determination. “I’ll be back every day while I’m on break if I have to, just to get to talk things through with Shuichi. Thanks for inspiring me, Kaito. I really appreciate it.”

“Heh, it’s all part of the job as Luminary of the Stars. Gotta be the bright, hopeful being that everyone looks to for direction, y’know,” he told her with a grin, before opening his arms to hug her again. She politely declined the gesture by stepping away from him, back towards the front door to the building, and he dropped his arms back to his sides and let the grin do all of the work instead. “Hope to see ya again tomorrow, Kaede Akamatsu, pianist extraordinaire! And hopefully it’ll end with ya talking to Shuichi!”

“I sure hope so!” she replied, bowing to him in thanks before taking her leave, her presence in the room almost instantly replaced with the returning one of Maki, who looked towards the closing door with a scowl, before asking what she’d missed when she’d stepped out for just a moment.

His eyes also looking at the door that Kaede had just walked out, Kaito opened his mouth to answer Maki’s question but he ended up closing it, instead choosing to drape one of his arms over her shoulder instead of giving any sort of verbal response. He couldn’t see the shocked, almost murderous look that came over her when she felt his touch, but he could feel the anger radiating off of her, and that made him only pull her closer. Some things were better off left unsaid, and he thought that if she knew he’d told Kaede to come back again and again until she got her way, there’d be more trouble than there already was.

In a way, he was right, but it wasn’t the fist-fighting sort of trouble he’d been expecting, and that made all the difference.

* * *

Shuichi was tired of the investigation he was currently knee-deep in, one that he’d begged to see get sent somewhere else but had been more or less forced into by the powers above his head. He was thankful it wasn’t a murder case, but theft was something else that he wasn’t the biggest fan of, especially when the person who was being accused of the crime was someone he knew somewhat personally. That was actually why Kyoko had told him he needed to see the case through, because he needed to find the evidence to prove that someone else had stolen the robot pieces from the science lab, rather than the person that was being accused of it, but the issue of that came with the fact that he was being expected to lead a team of ragtag investigators in finding non-damning evidence against Miu Iruma, of all the people in the world.

And when she seemed hell-bent on insisting that she hadn’t taken the robot, but that she would have gladly modified him to match the one the scientist had given her years before, complete with working genital parts, he didn’t know if there was any way she could be proven innocent with their evidence. “Look, Miu, it would be a lot easier if you would keep quiet about what you would do if you were given the missing robot,” he told her after several days of the dead-end investigation, which had scrubbed her personal laboratory completely clean and had found no sign of the robot that had disappeared. “You keep saying things like that, they keep going into the evidence record, we’re going to not have anything the attorneys can use to defend you.”

“I’m doing my job writing it all down,” Himiko said, showing off the notebook she’d been given to document any and all findings in. “It’s a lot of work because you say so much, but I made sure I didn’t miss any words.”

Red-faced and flustered once again, a common sight with so many people tearing up her beloved workspace, Miu had literal beads of sweat dripping down her face at the book that Himiko showed her. “You mean the attorneys get to see _all_ of the vulgar stuff I’ve said while you’ve been here?” she asked, gulping when both Himiko and Shuichi nodded at her. “Oh damn, they’re going to be soaking through all their layers at everything, and my name as an inventor is going to be soiled!”

“It was soiled long before this, if you think everyone learning how overly sexual you are is going to change a thing.” Shuichi had put up with Miu and her specific brand of vulgarities long enough to know that everyone was very much aware of the dirty mouth and body she had in her possession, and no amount of evidence regarding that would change anyone’s perspective on things. “The problem is, you keep talking about wanting to, uh, service robots, and that doesn’t help clear your name in regards to the crime we’re here to investigate, if that makes sense.”

“If that makes sense? Of course it makes sense, do I look like a fuckin’ moron over here? I know that me telling you I’d peg myself silly on a robo-dick will make me look bad, but it’s the truth, and it also clears my name because the robot that’s missing specifically does not have a dick, because I never touched it.” That was the defense that Miu had kept stating over and over, that she couldn’t have stolen the robot because it was missing pieces that she would have installed on its frame if it belonged to her. It wasn’t a very good way of trying to clear her name from the suspect list, however, and that was why Shuichi was still there after days of going through the investigation.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a few short breaths, while Himiko did what she did best and jotted a couple more notes down on her paper. “We can’t prove that the missing robot doesn’t have those, ahem, enhancements if we don’t know where it is, and unfortunately your word on the matter doesn’t exactly prove your innocence on the matter. We have to know where the robot is, or have some idea where that might be, we can’t just give them the evidence that you swear you didn’t take it. They’ll laugh and lock you up.”

“Except I really didn’t take it, and I can prove it!” Grabbing her hair and tugging on it, making her look panicked on top of her already-flustered state, Miu began bouncing around the room, looking for something in particular that wouldn’t have possibly been anything that Shuichi hadn’t already seen in his time investigating. She came back moments later with the panic mostly eased from her face, although she was still covered in her own sweat. “He’ll come in here any second now and show how I’m innocent, and then you’ll be sorry for wasting all your time here, you stupid virgin!”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say to Shuichi,” Himiko mumbled, writing down the exact words that Miu had just used, in case they turned out to be important evidence. The delivery of Miu’s statement had caught him by surprise, so he was thankful that Himiko was able to say something about it, but right as Shuichi found the words to calmly retort, he was interrupted by the clanking sound that let them all know a robot was among them.

Everyone’s eyes looked to the doorway from which the robot was coming, his eyes lit up to look friendly and approachable, even though he was the one doing the approaching. “Someone pressed my call button and I came as soon as I could,” he said, his voice sounding surprisingly natural for being a robot. “Is something the matter? Miu, are these people bothering you? Is that why you called?”

“They’re bothering me, but it’s either them or the real cops, and I’d rather them than someone who’d throw me to the ground and handcuff me in a non-sexy way any day.” Miu waved off the robot’s concern, walking to his side and beginning to fiddle with the strings of the apron he was wearing. “Why do you have this dumb thing on, you’re a damn robot, you don’t need an apron while you’re cooking!”

“I figured my circuitry would not appreciate being splashed with cooking oil.”

“Fuck your circuitry, you look like a dumbass wearing an apron!” Getting one of the strings untied, Miu quickly moved onto the other set, and once it was untied she threw the whole thing aside, leaving the robot standing before the detective duo in his metal clothing. “See, you’re already dressed, there’s no point in having something over it! Now take your pants off, I need to show them why I couldn’t have stolen that other robot!”

Looking between each other with wide eyes, it was Shuichi who jumped to say something before Himiko could, because she was going back to writing what was happening down. “I don’t think that’s necessary, Miu, you don’t have to ask him to get undressed to show us your modifications of his body. We believe you about it, I promise.”

“If you believe me about that, why can’t you believe me when I say I didn’t steal the robot from the professor? I wouldn’t lie to you about that either.” Miu huffed, leaning against the side of the robot she did have, who was looking rather confused at what was happening around him. “What else is there that I can do for you to prove I didn’t take it?”

“I do not mean to interrupt, but when did this heist take place? Perhaps I can be of use in clearing Miu’s name on the matter.” Her robot spoke calmly, even though he wasn’t filled in on what was happening, and it was then that Shuichi realized that perhaps her dragging this robot into the whole situation may have been more helpful than she’d realized. That, or it would lead to him innocently broadcasting graphic images of what, exactly, Miu had been up to on the night of the crime she was a suspect for, images that neither Shuichi nor Himiko wanted to see, needed to see, or could stop thinking about even after they’d left for the day.

Their ride back to the station was in complete silence, unable to so much as look in the other person’s direction without thinking about the pornographic images they’d seen of their friend and person they were trying to protect. Once they’d gotten back to the station, Himiko handed him her notebook and left without another word, but he had to go inside, write up a report on what had happened, and check on any other investigations he may have been invited to while he was out. At that time of day, it was typical for there to be no one still at the station, so he was caught by surprise when he saw both Kaito and Maki inside, sitting at the front desk in the middle of conversation, and he was so surprised at their presence that he greeted them by saying, “I was just shown twenty minutes of robot porn,” before scurrying off to his office, leaving them just as confused and surprised as he was at them still being there.

The knock that came at his door was unmistakably from Kaito, who usually knocked a few times before barreling in anyway, yet when the door opened it was Maki who came inside first. “What in the world was that introduction about?” she snapped, hobbling right up to his desk and taking a seat, not caring that Shuichi was busy distracting himself with his report. “I have known you for _how_ long, and you’ve never come in here with that sort of thing.”

“It was Miu’s fault, she brought Kiibo into the investigation and that was his contribution to matters. It certainly helps clear her name, but it doesn’t help us figure out who took the missing robot in the first place.” He was speaking hurriedly, as if he didn’t want to have to spend more time thinking about what had happened at the lab than he needed to. “That’s what happened with me, now why are you two still here? Please tell me that nothing bad happened to the two of you as well, I can’t afford losing either one of you longer than I’m already going to be.”

“Nah, nothing bad happened, but we had a fun visitor today!” Clasping his hands together, Kaito came to stand right behind where Maki had seated herself, leaning forward until his goatee hairs were brushing against the top of her head. “C’mon, you’ve gotta be interested in who came to visit us while you weren’t here.”

With all of the other things that were actively on his mind, not to mention the fact that he was trying to forget about the images he’d endured, Shuichi did not seem as interested as Kaito was hoping, and that was just how things were going to be. “Is now really an appropriate time for this conversation?” he asked, not even looking at the two. “I have work to finish and neither of you really need to be here, so perhaps we could talk later?”

“No way, we’re talking about this now!” This time the hands came together not in a clasp, but in one punching the other’s open palm, and the noise of the impact was enough not to just get Shuichi’s attention off of his work, but to make Maki nearly jump out of her seat, as the noise was right behind her head. “The person who came to visit us is someone you’re super familiar with, and she came here to see you and only you!”

“And you told her that I’m unavailable and that she can come back, I assume?” Shuichi could make some guesses as to who it was that had stopped by, typical visitors to the station whenever he was around, but none of them warranted this kind of confrontation. “If that’s the case, then I fail to see why you’re in here bothering me about it.”

“It’s not a normal someone, idiot,” Maki said, rolling her eyes as she settled back into the chair, her heart having stopped pounding so hard from the scare she’d just endured. “It’s someone that’s only around for a little while, and she thought that she was more important than anything else in the world.”  
None of that matched with the idea of who it was that had wormed its way into Shuichi’s mind, and he tilted his head slightly to the side as he looked at Maki’s no-nonsense expression, trying to judge how serious she was being. “Oh yeah? Would you mind not being so vague and just telling me who it was, then?”

“Kaede Akamatsu, the famous pianist you shared a room with during the flood!” Kaito seemed way too excited to make that announcement, and just hearing her name was enough to make Shuichi wish he hadn’t asked for the delivery to be in plain terms. He’d not quite forgotten that they’d been forced to share a bed for those nights, but he had pushed past the fact that she’d wanted nothing to do with him then—and now for her to come to his workplace looking for him, it simply didn’t make sense. The confusion he was experiencing must have made itself obvious on his face, because Kaito followed his statement up with, “She really seemed to want to talk to you, and I told her to come back to try again so you’ve gotta make her dreams happen, okay? Push aside the investigation for a day and stick around here to talk to Kaede.”

“I’m really afraid that can’t happen, not when we’ve got to find the robot and who stole it, before the courts disregard Miu’s sex tape with her own robot and arrest her anyway.” While the idea of having to talk to Kaede and see how her attitude towards him had changed over six weeks was interesting, Shuichi couldn’t push aside his work for her, not when she’d already caused him to lose footing in one case he’d been interested in. “If she wants to talk to me she’s going to have to wait until I’m off of this case, and that’s just how it is.”

“Ooh, or she could stick around until you get off for the night, I bet that would—”

“Kaito, if I get back tomorrow and she is sitting here I am getting you suspended without pay for at least a week.” Cue Kaito’s jaw dropping at how serious Shuichi sounded, but he wasn’t done with the threats. “And don’t think you’ll get off free as well, Maki. If she’s here when I get here tomorrow, you’re not getting paid while you’re out recovering from getting your foot fixed. Am I making myself clear?”

Neither of them wanted to say it, but they knew that Shuichi was most likely lying through his teeth to get them to not do what Kaito had suggested, no matter how serious he sounded about things. “We’ll think about not going against those wishes,” Maki replied after a couple moments, where Kaito dramatically picked his jaw up and closed it, before shaking his head and heading out of the office. She didn’t follow him out right away, waiting until he was gone to lean closer to Shuichi’s desk to say, “I don’t know what she sees in you, or what you don’t see in her, but I think not talking to her is your best choice here. You can do better than a famous broad like her.”

“I’m not exactly taking relationship advice from someone who’s romantically linked with Kaito, but thanks for trying.” That was what got Maki’s jaw to drop, just like Kaito’s had before, and she was stunned speechless at how he’d called her out like that. With her boot on her foot she couldn’t dramatically leave the office like she wanted to, but she could cause a bit of scene stomping out, leaving Shuichi there to finish his work in silence.

When he packed up for the night, he was definitely the only person still there, the other two having left at some point while he’d worked without even a goodbye, but he deserved that from them after what he’d said. He was aware that Kaito would be over it by morning, but Maki would take longer to forgive him for things, and even that was fine by him. Being in the station by himself always felt weird, and so he made sure that he left as quickly as he could once he’d started turning lights off; when he locked the front door he felt something around him and he nearly dropped his keys in his haste of getting out of the area. The drive home was boring, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still being watched, and when he got to his apartment he made sure that every deadbolt on the door was fastened to ensure his safety.

But safety measures didn’t matter when he turned around to see Kokichi lounging on his sofa, feet kicked up on one of the armrests and his arms crossed behind his head. “It’s about time you got here, Shumai,” he said with a wink, ignoring the fact that Shuichi was clutching at his chest due to the shock of having someone waiting for him in his own home. “I’ve been here for hours, rather than working with you and Himiko, or being stuck at the station with those lovebirds. Why do you even keep them around, all they do is yell and cause trouble for others, mostly you.”

“H-how did you get a key to get in here?” Shuichi asked, having no idea how Kokichi could have gotten in without a key, not with how careful he was to lock things down. That, and he hadn’t noticed him inside when he’d first opened the door, so how had he been hiding in such plain sight? “Answer me, Kokichi, before I call the cops to get you out of here!”

“You wouldn’t really do that to me, would you?” Putting on a pout as he sat up, Kokichi looked like he was genuinely offended at the suggestion that Shuichi had made in his threat, but he knew that there was never going to be any action behind those words. “I got a spare key from your dear best friend, way back when I got his cell key, and I might’ve made a copy for this very moment.” He batted his eyelashes, an act that made Shuichi curl one hand into a fist and wish he had the strength to do something with it. “I’m worried about you, Shumai. All of this investigating stuff is getting to your head, and it’s ruining all your friendships. Like with me. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Last time I checked, friends don’t illegally make copies of keys to sneak into their apartment, but sure, we’re friends.” It was honestly hard for Shuichi to give his relationship with Kokichi any sort of label, because they went through so many emotions on a daily basis that it was hard to know where they stood any given moment. “You know why Kaito has one of those, don’t you? And why you weren’t asked to have one as well?”

Kokichi shrugged, before jutting his lower lip out. “Are you telling me that I’m not a good enough friend to be trusted with a key to check in on you with? Am I that bad of a friend?”

“You’re not exactly the person I want to see in here if I’m having a down day, if that’s what you’re asking.” That statement, a completely true answer from Shuichi’s point of view, was enough to set Kokichi off on a minute-long crying fit, only for him to stop, shrug it off, and act like nothing had happened at all. It was strange, but it was completely expected coming from him and wasn’t anything that Shuichi didn’t know how to handle. “Look, Kaito has that key so that if he thinks I’m in any sort of trouble, he can come by and make sure I’m alive and taking care of myself. What good does you having the key do for me?”

“That’s easy, since he’s got himself a girlfriend that’s taking up all of his time and brainpower, I can step into his role and show you that I’m twice the friend that he ever has been. In fact,” Kokichi stood up, walking slowly towards Shuichi with his arms opening up for a hug, “I’ll do what Kaito’s a fool for not doing and make you mine, that way you don’t have to worry about ‘check-ins’ because you’ll have someone living with you full-time.”

This was a topic they’d discussed before, many times, and it was one that Shuichi always tried to get out of whenever other people were around. Sure, he wasn’t exactly fond of how Kokichi could behave at times, but he wasn’t as put off by him as so many others he knew were, even though it was nothing he wanted to deal with all the time. They’d discussed attempting to date before, never coming to anything beyond an agreement that it could happen, and this was clearly another attempt at getting past that point. The idea of having someone there at the apartment to help him through all of his times, good and bad, was tempting to Shuichi, but he hesitated to get on-board with the idea that Kokichi was the best fit for that role. “Maybe we can try it as a friend thing?” he suggested, seeing Kokichi’s arms and face fall at the rejection of his potentially-romantic advances. “I know, you want to date someone and show them how great of a person you are, but I don’t think I’m the one you want or need right now.”

“And who else do you expect me to ask? Himiko? No thanks, she’s too boring for me. Maki and Kaito can’t get off of each other, so they’re out of the question, and that really just leaves you, and I’m not going to start hitting bars and clubs looking for people to replace you, Shumai. Just…go with it, please.” There was genuine—or at least what sounded like genuine—desperation in Kokichi’s voice, but Shuichi wasn’t going to give in to his request, not right there and then.

Something didn’t seem to sit right in his heart whenever he told himself he needed to be open-minded and give it a chance, but Shuichi had no idea what it could be. “I’m sorry, Kokichi, but I’m really only looking to be friends with you right now. There’s too much going on in my life right now for me to want or need anything else.”

“I get it, you just don’t want to get into workplace romance, it’s as easy as saying that. Not like I’m really into you either, I just wanted to see what you’d say if I tried asking you out.” The grin that appeared on Kokichi’s face was clearly masking some real emotions, but Shuichi was not about to open that can of worms. “I’ll get out of your hair now, I bet you’ve had a long day getting harassed by Miu that I’m just making everything wa-a-a-ay worse than it needs to be, huh?”

“That’s one way to put it. Thanks for being understanding about things, Kokichi, I just…have a lot on my mind right now.” Even with that agreement having been reached, once Shuichi had escorted his unwanted guest out and had the door properly locked once more, the apartment all to himself, he couldn’t help but think that wasn’t the end of that. But he really couldn’t bring himself to be open to Kokichi’s advances for some reason, and he needed to know why that was. It wasn’t like there was anyone else he wanted to date, so why couldn’t he give him a shot?

[]

Over the next couple of days, Kaede would find her way over to the detective station, hoping that she’d finally get to speak with Shuichi like she so desperately needed to, but every time she entered the building it was one of the same two people there waiting for her. She liked it more when it was the man over the woman, but neither of them were who she wanted so even when it was her preferred outcome there it was still hollow. “Can’t I just wait around until he shows up?” she asked after a few days of the same result, a question that was answered by a panicked-sounding “no!” that made her curious as to why she got that kind of response, but she didn’t dare question further.

When she was down to only three days before she was back on tour, she was beginning to grow desperate about getting to see him, but just like all the days before he wasn’t there when she arrived, and she was told she couldn’t stick around to see him. “I’d say he’s avoiding you, but we all know why he’s not here and it’s nothing to do with you,” Maki said, in the kindest voice she’d used when speaking with Kaede. “Damn missing robot and everything attached to it, he’s having to tear up the city to find any leads and it’s wasting all of his time and yours.”

“I know, I just want to see him and it’s not really working.” That was the day that Kaede had shown up with tear-stained cheeks, not from crying over the potential of another missed connection but rather from the lashing she’d received from her father when she’d had to accept that she needed to ask him for a ride, rather than continuing using the taxi service in the city. The fact that she’d walked in already emotionally distraught must have had something to do with why Maki was being nice to her, but she wasn’t going to argue against the change in treatment. “I just want to have a real conversation with him, about the things that went down between us there in that hotel, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.”

“Oh, it’ll happen, and I know exactly how to make it work.” There was a sympathetic tone in Maki’s voice, and yet Kaede wasn’t sure if she could trust it right away. It took until they’d stared each other down for a few seconds, which culminated in Kaede’s eyes beginning to brim with tears, that she decided she could place her faith in whatever it was that Maki was going to tell her. “Tomorrow evening, Shuichi has somewhere he’s going to be that you can just happen to meet him at. He can’t get upset, since it’s a public place, and you’ll get to have your conversation with him.”

“Where is this?” she asked, trying not to start crying at how this break had fallen for her. “I’ll definitely meet him there, you’ve just got to tell me where it is!”

Maki held a finger to her lips, trying to get Kaede to lower her volume so that anyone else currently at the station (which was just Kaito, somewhere in the back) wouldn’t hear what was being said. “Tomorrow’s when they’re finally rebreaking my foot to fix it, so naturally that’ll be at the hospital. Just sit down in the lobby, Shuichi knows he’s supposed to show up at a certain time and he’s not going to be late, so you won’t miss him.”

“You’re…using something personal to you to help me?”

“Look, I’m tired of seeing you come in every day looking like a lost dog searching for your owner, I’m doing what I can to make things work.” The sympathy had already, suddenly, been replaced with the icy coldness that Maki had always spoken with, but Kaede knew that she was just putting her face back on. “It’ll work, as long as you’re there before he is. If you’re the one to show up late, that’s on you.”

Shaking her head at a vibrating pace, Kaede quickly said, “I won’t be late, I’ve got to talk to him and this looks like my only chance! Now give me the details so I’m sure to be at the right place at the right time!”

“It’d be easier if you show up here, Kaito and I can swing by on our way to get you over there, and then we’ll take you home if you need it.” She could see that Kaede’s optimism on the situation was faltering at mention of needing to come to the station again, but Maki wasn’t going to suggest making two house calls in one day. “Just…be here no later noon tomorrow, we’ll take care of everything else.”

“I’m really going to trust you on this,” sniffled Kaede, as she brought a hand to wipe the now-falling tears from one of her eyes. This wasn’t crying due to the kindness she was being shown, but rather because of a different part of what had been suggested that she was not looking forward to needing. She almost opened her mouth to ask another favor, but she stopped herself from considering it when the phone rang, and Maki completed her switch from kindness to coldness, answering the call and waving Kaede away at the same time.

As she walked outside, grabbing her cellphone out of her purse that she’d been carrying on her arm, Kaede remembered the ride she’d endured over to the station and froze thinking about how she either needed to call her father, or pay for yet another cab ride back to her family’s home. But going back there didn’t sit right within her heart, not at that moment, and that was when she decided to call some friends to see if they were around and available, to go spend some time with. It was a long process, but she was able to get through to one of them, get where she was currently staying, and order a ride over there, just to avoid going home and having to deal with that drama.

The hotel she was dropped off outside of was incredibly fancy, but that was to be expected when it was located in the swanky part of town, where the concert halls and the business buildings all met. She was able to get inside without so much as a second glance, because everyone around there recognized Kaede Akamatsu, she’d been selling out shows in the area since before she was even a teenager, and once she’d entered the lobby her mind flashed back to the hotel she’d been in with Shuichi. There’d been that lovely piano there, that she’d spent so much time playing, and she almost wished she could go back to play it again—but that wasn’t what she needed to do with her time. Instead, she got in the elevator and rode it all the way up to the top floor, stepping out into another world; this was the typical life of famous musicians, and it was one that she tried to stay out of if it was her own choice.

“Kaede! Glad to see you stop by!” The voice was loud, and cheerful, and it was followed with a softer one also calling out a greeting, and Kaede smiled when she saw the two ladies sitting surrounded by crates and trunks full of show costumes. “Sayaka just got here too, so it’s perfect timing! Now Ibuki gets to have all her favorite collaborators with her at once! Yay!”

“If I had known that there was something going on here, I would have been over sooner,” Kaede said, knowing that she could have reworked her day to make arriving at the penthouse suite at that hotel happen earlier. It would have drastically altered the course of her day, meaning she would’ve been at the station at a different time, but more importantly it may have been able to save her from the conversation she’d had with her father. But everything had happened the way it did for a reason, she couldn’t take any of it back, and so she needed to work with what she now had. “What’s with all of the clothes, Ibuki? I thought you just changed up your wardrobe for your new tour.”

“I did, but there’s so many other cute things I could wear that I decided I’d pick some new things to go with the fishnets and bright colors! No one’s going to complain if the Ibuki Mioda has a costume change during her concert! They’re just gonna hope for a nip slip or two, you know!” Giggling to herself, even though neither of the others present found what she said to be funny (and Sayaka was actually blushing at the idea of that happening to someone), Ibuki got to her feet and gestured to everything she had sprawled out on the floor. “Take a look for yourself, see if there’s anything you’d be interested in borrowing!”

Swallowing down the fears that she always had crop up whenever clothing was mentioned, Kaede took a chance and reached into the first trunk that she got close enough to, pulling out a leather minidress that looked like it would burst before she even managed to get it halfway on. It wasn’t even that she was _large_ , it was rather that Ibuki was so tiny that they were vastly different sizes, with Sayaka somewhere in the middle of them. “I don’t think that borrowing anything of yours will really work for me,” Kaede admitted, putting the dress back down where she’d gotten it from. “But if we ever get to have a show together, I’ll definitely wear something more your style!”

While Ibuki pumped her fists excitedly at the idea, Sayaka let out a long sigh, propping her head against her palm and leaning into it. “I wish I had that sort of control over what I get to wear during concerts, but the entire idol group has to agree on any wardrobe changes, even when we’re doing solo shows. And since they hate when we try to outshine others, I’ll have to stick with the schoolgirl-themed uniform if we ever collaborate.”

“That’s okay, Ibuki has a lot of school clothes she can wear to match!” The fist-pumping came to a slow halt, as Ibuki watched Kaede going through some of the other trunks of clothing, her eyes searching for something she wasn’t finding. “Uh, Piano Princess? What’s got you looking so sour? Is it that I don’t have any long dresses like you always wear? Miniskirts and cutoff shorts are the way of the future, you know!”

“Oh, I didn’t realize I was looking sour, I guess I just got kind of lost in my own thoughts. You know how things get, one moment you’re looking at clothing, the next you’re thinking about how you knew someone who used to always talk about dressing like this when she got famous.” Those were words that spilled out of Kaede’s mouth faster than she could stop them, and she brought a silence to the room once she’d said her bit. Ibuki immediately ran over to her and grabbed her in a hug, and Sayaka was not far behind her, and the three of them stood in their embrace amongst the clothing for quite some time. When they broke apart, the vibes between them weren’t quite the same, even when Ibuki switched the topic from clothing to music, and then from music to what their plans for the upcoming weeks were, and none of it was her own fault.

Eventually she gave up on trying to fix things and set out to address the issue as it was, even though she was the least-qualified person to have a serious conversation with someone. “Kaede, I don’t like you looking so sad. Cheer up, ‘cause do you really think she likes looking down at you being like this? Ibuki doesn’t like seeing it, and she’s right here!”

“Ibuki, I think you could have handled that—”

“At this point, I don’t think there’s anything she can look down on me doing and appreciate, aside from playing piano.” One of Kaede’s hands had absentmindedly grabbed a pleated skirt from inside of a trunk, and she was playing with the plaid fabric, memories coming back to her that she hated dwelling on, but that had been on her mind since her father had brought them to the forefront earlier in the day. “I’ve gone against everything my parents told me she’d have wanted after what happened, and it’s all because of a cute detective I met.”

“—see, you could’ve handled it better, now Kaede’s going to talk to us about boy problems.” Sayaka put on a knowing smile, flipping her long blue hair off of her shoulder so that she could have it out of her way. “We know how this one goes, your father doesn’t approve because he’s a detective, but you want to pursue him anyway, right?”

“He told me that Kotone would be disappointed in me if she knew I was trying to interact with the people responsible for us never getting justice for her death.” The second that Kaede had said her sister’s name she’d gotten choked up, but she couldn’t stop herself from getting everything off of her chest. “And I know that, but it’s not like this detective had anything to do with it! He can’t be any older than me, and since this happened in high school, there’s no way that we can blame him for a crime that happened before he was a detective!”

“It’s part of your father’s grief process to blame the institution, not just individual people, for that lapse in justice,” Sayaka pointed out, before adding, “I heard all about that from Kyoko in the weeks after the murder, because she was brought to the scene a few times to try to find any clues and she always came up empty-handed, which then had to be relayed to your father, even though he shouldn’t have had to hear it.”

This was all familiar to Kaede, as she’d been having conversations like this about the crime that had been committed against her family ever since it had happened, but she was so wrapped up in her emotions that she didn’t bother asking for it to stop. “He’s never forgiven anyone for what happened, not the school, not the guards, not the police, and especially not the detectives who couldn’t find who did it. My sister, killed in broad daylight after being harassed for not being ‘good’ enough to be like me.” Memories of the day that she’d learned of the murder pushed into Kaede’s mind, and she fell victim to them, remembering that she’d been out of the country with their mother on a school trip when her father had called them to tell them they needed to get back, that her sister had been killed by some unknown assailant after reporting persistent harassment about not being quite as talented as her younger twin. “Our family broke that day, and it shattered more today when my father found out about my interest in this detective.”

“He’ll get over it,” Ibuki said, not realizing how rude her statement sounded, but it was what Kaede needed to hear in the moment. “You can’t always live your life trying to please your dad, it won’t end well for you. That’s why you’ve gotta just do what you wanna do with your life, and not care what he thinks!”

“Or you can sit down and have a proper conversation with him on the matter, so that you make it clear that this detective you’re talking to is in no way related to your sister’s murder. Maybe that will help him come to terms with it.” Sayaka’s approach was a lot gentler, even though it was something that Kaede knew would be impossible to do given the anger her father had shown her on the matter. “I wish I could say more than that, but I’ve never been in your shoes. My parents have had no issue with anything I’ve done.”

Kaede sighed, throwing her shoulders forward to show how dramatic she was acting. “That’s the thing, this is the first time he’s been upset with me like this. I knew it was coming the moment I realized I had loose ends with the detective, but I didn’t know it was going to happen quite like this.”

They continued talking for a while, both Ibuki and Sayaka trying to give advice that they themselves would follow in such a situation, but when it came down to it, all of their ideas weren’t going to work for what Kaede was dealing with. They’d be perfect if she’d come home with a piercing, or an extreme haircut, or a desire to change her life’s course, but this involved something that was a great burden on her family, and it wasn’t going to be quite so easy to work past that. She was still thankful for their time and suggestions, though, and when evening was in full swing she made her thankfulness clear before letting them know that she was going to leave. “Oh, it is getting later than I realized, I should go as well,” Sayaka said, taking Kaede’s hand after she’d caught up to her friend trying to head out. “We’ll go together, so you know we’re both being safe. See you next time, Ibuki.”

On the ride down in the elevator, Kaede was able to wrestle her hand out of Sayaka’s grip, looking at her with a solemn expression. “You’re doing this to make sure I don’t have to call my dad to come get me, aren’t you?” she asked, to which Sayaka gave a quick nod. “I figured about as much, you really know how to read someone’s problems.”

“More like, I paid attention to what you were saying and came up with a plan. My ride will take you home, and then any time you need to get out while you’re still here, I’ll be right over to save you. That’s a promise between friends, and if we meet at my studio perhaps you can play some music to complement my vocals.” Sayaka’s eyes crinkled as she smiled, and Kaede returned the gesture, thankful to have someone so nice in her corner that night.

Their ride over to her house came in the form of a vehicle with deeply tinted windows, to keep people from ogling them while they sat in the backseat, talking about music and the tours they were in the middle of. For one being a classical pianist and the other being part of a huge pop sensation girl group, they had a lot of things in common, and it was nice for them to be able to talk about them just between them. As they approached the house, Kaede’s whole body began to tense up, at which Sayaka took her by the hand once more and gently stroked it, assuring her that everything was going to be okay when she went inside.

Her friend was right, but only because there was no one there when she got to the front door. Instead, a note was attached to the door, taped on hastily and addressed “to my maple leaf,” which Kaede cringed at seeing. She ripped it off the door, waved for Sayaka and her driver to head off, and began reading what it said—and found that her mother had heard what had happened earlier that day and had decided that it would be fitting for an impromptu date night to happen. She was told where the spare key was (and she didn’t need to ask what the password to the lockbox was because it was her own birthday), and what food there was to cook if she wanted to make her own dinner.

It wasn’t necessary, because Kaede went inside, made sure everything was relocked and made to look like she wasn’t there, and she went up to her childhood bedroom where she stayed every time she came back home, throwing herself onto the bed and crying until she fell asleep, still fully dressed and without having eaten anything since that morning. When she woke up to the sunrise, her eyes felt heavy and her stomach growled at her, but she didn’t want to open the door and see the closed one across the hall, marked with a sign in bubbly letters that it was Kotone’s room. She’d dreamt all night about things relating to her sister, always ending in a knife fight that left her dead on the sidewalk, and she knew she couldn’t handle seeing the evidence of the real person she knew who’d died that way.

Downstairs, she could hear her parents bustling around, their voices soft but still able to be heard off and on. If she waited long enough, they’d forget she was there and go about their business, and then she’d be able to sneak off into the day to do her own thing, and go anywhere that wasn’t home after that. It made her feel guilty to think about it, but she almost hoped that she would be able to get to go home with someone else that night, rather than have to ever return to face her father and his disappointment.

Noontime came a lot quicker than Kaede realized, but she knew from her experience that week that it was only a ten-minute drive over to the detective station where she needed to get, so she scheduled a ride over and got herself ready for the inevitable. She could still hear her parents downstairs but she couldn’t avoid them forever, not when she needed to leave, and as soon as she was dressed and presentable she grabbed everything she felt she needed for the day and bounded down the stairs, dashing towards the door before she heard a stern voice call out her name, and her blood froze in her veins as she turned to face her father. “And just where do you think you’re going, without telling us you’re even alive? Is that any way a child should act in her parents’ home?”

“I’m not a child, and I’m going out. I’ll be back later, if that’s fine with you.” She tried to put on a smile but all that came was the corners of her mouth turning up ever-so-slightly, coming off more like a smirk than anything else. That was not what she needed to do, not when her father was already upset with her, and his shaky finger pointing towards the door behind her and telling her to get out of his sight was the reasonable, if not completely painful, natural response to that sort of thing.

She ran to the waiting taxi crying, not knowing how else she could handle that treatment without making things worse. Thankfully part of ordering the ride had been to tell the driver the destination, so she was able to sit and cry without having to say a word to the quiet man in the front seat, but when they’d hit traffic on their way he did give her a small apology. If she’d been heading anywhere else, she wouldn’t have minded the slight disruption, but she’d been told to be there at noon, and showing up five minutes past was not what was agreed upon. The parking lot was empty and yet she was still dropped off, and she went to the door to see if maybe Maki, or even Kaito, was inside waiting for her.

Staring back at her when she peered inside was an unfamiliar set of eyes that made her jump back in shock, and when the person opened the door to let her in she didn’t know how to react to them. They were small, with purple hair and a wicked grin on their face, and when she stepped inside they cupped their face with their hands and called out, “Oh my god, it’s Kaede Akamatsu! What’s a pianist like you doing in a place like this? Surely not looking for a detective to romance, hm?”

“Wh-what would give you that kind of idea?” she asked, stepping away from the person in shock at how on the nose their accusation was, if this had been any other day. “I’m here to talk to one of the reception people. Maki told me to meet her here at noon, and—”

“Aw, you’re the one she was blabbering about? Talking about how she couldn’t trust you to keep your word and that she wasn’t surprised that you bailed out on her? Yeah, she’s already long gone. Kaito too, he was kissing her hand and telling her everything was fine, because you really disappointed her with whatever you didn’t do.” The person snorted, before taking a big jump to stand right in front of Kaede, looking up at her with that devious grin still prominent on their lips. “You’re going to be in big trouble next time you see her.”

“There’s probably not going to be a next time, this is definitely going to be my last time over here for a while, if not ever.” The stress of everything that had happened on this visit home had finally broken Kaede, with this missed connection being the last straw. “All I wanted,” she sobbed, bending over and covering her eyes with her hands, catching all of her falling tears, “was to talk to Shuichi again, and I couldn’t make that happen!”

The person tilted their head, their grin fading for a moment as gears turned within their mind. “You’re here to see Shumai? Well, why didn’t you say so sooner! I know just the guy who can help you with that!” They dropped one hand from their cheek and thrust it into their pocket, pulling out a key that they brandished proudly. “And that guy happens to be me, how fun is that?”

“You can help me get to talk to Shuichi?” Kaede lifted her head to look at the man, as he nodded rather eagerly. “Tell me how you can do it, the only idea Maki had was ruined by me not getting here on time so I’m all ears!”

“I don’t know if you’re really interested in what I’ve got for you,” he replied, jangling the keys that were attached to the one he so proudly held. “It involves a little trespassing, a little going into somewhere we shouldn’t be without permission, a little bit of a rude wake-up call for a sleepyhead on his day off…but if you’re up to it, I can get you right to Shumai’s bedside in, like, an hour at most.”

“Hold on, I don’t want to go into his home!” For a moment, Kaede had thought that maybe this guy was Shuichi’s roommate, or perhaps someone that he trusted with a key to his place, but after what he’d said there was no doubt that he should not have been holding what he was. “I was going to talk to him over at the hospital, because that’s where Maki knew he was going to be later today, so if you could manage to get me over there, I’d appreciate that a lot more than breaking into his home!”  
As he put the keys away, the man sniffled and said, “Aw man, here I was thinking that I was suggesting the best thing to do about all of this. Why would you want to meet him at the hospital to have a talk, are you going to tell him you’re dying? Shouldn’t you pick a happier place to do that?”

“No, I…” Kaede sighed, feeling frustrated with how this was unfolding in front of her. “I just didn’t know where else to do it, and that was the place that Maki suggested, because she could get me there and know that he’d show up. Now will you take me there, or do I need to find someone else to do it?”

The grin came back onto the man’s face, followed by him putting a finger across his lips as his eyes honed in on Kaede’s. “Good luck finding someone else around here willing to do that for you. I guess I can make it work, but you’ve got to promise me something before I agree to do it. I don’t just do favors for my own health.”

“Whatever it is, it can’t be _that_ bad, so go for it.”

Kaede was expecting a request for a specific topic to be brought up, or even something mean-spirited, but all the man did was cackle. “I’m gonna drop you off at a place down the street, rather than at the hospital, since I know Shumai isn’t supposed to be there for a few hours. While you’re there, you tell them that you’re getting treated under Kokichi’s tab, and they’ll hook you up. Can you do that for me?” It seemed innocent enough, even with the maintained grin and creepy expression, and so she agreed to it without a second thought, something that she regretted the moment she was dropped off in front of a run-down bar, Kokichi waving for her to have fun before he peeled off into the afternoon sun.

“I bet he’ll ask whatever contact he’s got here if I actually showed up, so I guess I’ve got no choice but to actually do it,” she said to herself, taking a deep breath before walking inside the side of the door that didn’t have a board in place of its glass. Inside the bar was a lot more friendly-looking than outside, and they even had a piano sitting in the dining area, but Kaede knew what she’d been told she needed to do and so she approached the man at the counter, telling him that she was there to put her things under a tab, and the way the man smiled at her at the sound let her know that she was in for some trouble.

On the plus side, Kaede was able to spend quite some time playing piano music to an empty dining room and bar, the only audience she found being the employees who were running her drinks left and right. Not everything she received was alcoholic, but after the first couple drinks she was assured that she’d be treated well and that she didn’t need to place any orders, and she’d had just enough alcohol to not really care that she was being used as a way to make someone who worked with law enforcement have to pay a hefty bill. She was giving them music and they were giving her drinks, and it was a lovely agreement she’d stumbled her way into, until it was time for her to head across the street and wait for the detective to show up at the agreed meeting place.

She could walk in a relatively straight line, and when she thanked the employees for their kindness she could talk without slurring her words, but Kaede’s mind felt jumbled as she tried getting over to the lobby of the hospital. It may have been because she had barely eaten during all of that, and with how many different drinks she’d been given she probably should have been eating a lot more, but she wasn’t too inebriated to be able to get where she needed to go. People stopped, pointed, and stared at her as she passed them, taking her time making sure she didn’t make any missteps as she walked, and when she finally got into the lobby all she wanted was a glass of water and somewhere to sit.

Now she needed to hope that she would recognize Shuichi whenever he came inside—something that she realized someone who didn’t want her talking to him would make difficult for her to do. “Aw man, that Kokichi guy wasn’t being nice to me after all,” she said to herself, speaking much louder than she would have if she was completely sober. “He’s probably Shuichi’s boyfriend or something, and he doesn’t want me talking to him because of it. Now I’m just ruining everyone’s lives by trying to do this, aren’t I?”

She collapsed into one of the plush chairs in the lobby, her eyes pointed towards the front doors, and waited for something to happen. Mentally she was trying to convince herself that this was pointless and that she was doing the wrong thing by sitting there waiting for him, and yet when employees came over to check on her she would happily tell them she was fine, she was just waiting for someone. At one point her phone vibrated in her pocket and she pulled it out, seeing that it was Sayaka messaging her asking if everything was going okay, and she didn’t respond because she wasn’t sure how to. All of her hopes had been raised so high about things working out that they’d fallen harder than she had when she’d sat down, and she was working through keeping faith while trying to piece everything together.

Finally, after some amount of time she couldn’t even quantify, she saw a familiar face come into the building, looking around like a man on a mission. She got to her feet, wobbling slightly from how fast she’d stood, before she walked towards him, intercepting him on what she assumed was his way to the elevators. “Hey there, Shuichi,” she greeted, trying to grab his arms to stop him but watching him freeze mid-step, looking at her and instinctively backing away. “Oh, that’s the greeting I get?”

“What in the world are you _doing_ here, Kaede?” His response was quick, almost as if he had been anticipating seeing her at some point but not knowing where or when to expect it. “Who told you that I was going to be here? Better yet, why did you listen to them?”

She blinked a few times, confused because she knew that the person who’d arranged this meeting was the same person that he was there to see. “I listened to her because she seemed like she could be trusted,” she said, throwing her head side to side as she thought of any other things she could tack onto her statement. “And she was, because now I get to talk to you! Come on, come sit with me, I’ve got things to say to you.”

“You’ve been drinking, I can smell it on your breath.” It didn’t help that Kaede had progressively gotten closer and closer to Shuichi as she’d been talking, and he didn’t want to keep backing away and cause a scene that the hospital employees would want to step into the middle of. “Whatever you’ve got to say to me, certainly it should be said when you’ve sobered up, right?”

What Kaede wanted to tell him was that she couldn’t wait any longer to talk to him, not when she’d caused so much trouble in getting to the point she was at, but he seemed so convincing with his almost concerned tone that she didn’t want to argue. “Yeah, probably should wait,” she replied with a nod, backing away. “Sorry to take up your time right here, I’ll try to catch you some other time when you’re not so busy and I’m not so…like this.”

“Sounds like a plan. Good to see you again, but next time make sure you don’t smell like a bar when you try talking to me. Reminds me of people I’d rather not think of.” The way he scowled when he said that, followed by walking away from her without another word, made Kaede fully understand that she’d been set up from the moment she’d shown up at the station and met with Kokichi, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to follow him and let him know what had led to her being the way she was.

With heavy feet she walked back to the chair she’d been sitting in before, grabbing her phone again and finally replying to Sayaka’s message that things hadn’t gone so well and that she needed someone she trusted to come get her. Until she knew her ride was there she sat there, trying her hardest not to cry over how things had seemed so promising and yet had fallen apart in the blink of an eye. She’d ruined her chance at talking to Shuichi, and just finding that chance had made her ruin her relationship with her parents, and that was because she’d failed the memory of her sister.

“I shouldn’t have even tried this, Kotone,” she mumbled, tears bubbling at the corners of her eyes. “If you were here you would’ve told me to stay away from him, and I should’ve done it, but I…but he…” Whatever words were meant to follow she swallowed down hard, replacing them with a promise to herself. “I’m not going to worry about him anymore. This was my chance, and I blew it, and that’s that. The detective is going to be far from my mind, from here until the end of time.”

Meanwhile, by that point Shuichi had already made it up to the room he was there to visit, and he was standing right outside the door, his face reddening with every word that he was being told by the man he was speaking with. “I can’t believe she got to talk to you and you pushed her away like that, so what if she might’ve been drinking? Do you know how hard it was for me to get Maki Roll to accept that she wasn’t making our meeting this afternoon, and she still ended up showing up here anyway?” Kaito was talking with his hands, moving them around wildly and trying his hardest not to grab Shuichi’s shoulders to shake them, knowing that he was flustering his friend enough as it was. “And then what did she get outta all of this, you tellin’ her to talk to you some other time! Do you think that’s fair?”

“Look, she wasn’t sober and I wasn’t going to listen to her say something she didn’t mean to tell me because she’d been drinking. What would you have done in that situation?” Shuichi braced himself for getting another earful, but what he got was Kaito looking pensive for a moment, before shrugging. “That’s my point, you would’ve done what I did.”

“Nah man, I’m still thinking about what I’d do if I had a famous pianist wantin’ to talk to me about feelings and junk. I’ve had plenty of conversations like that with Maki Roll lately, when she’d take too much pain medication and get way outta her mind.” Once again Kaito shrugged, before leaning backwards to peer into the room they were standing outside. “Betcha when we go back in there, she’s gonna be like that for us, and you’ll see how easy it is to talk to her.”

“Hold on, repeat what you just said.”

Standing back tall, Kaito obliged the best he could. “About Maki Roll? She’s gonna be like that when we go in there.” Cue Shuichi telling him to repeat the first part, not the part about his basically-girlfriend. “Ah, yeah, that Kaede’s got feelings of some kind for ya? Wasn’t that obvious by her wanting to talk to you? You can’t tell me you didn’t know that, if even I knew it.”

“No, I…didn’t know that. I never would have assumed that, because she’s rich and famous and I’m a detective who solves small crimes for a living.” Deep down in his heart Shuichi didn’t believe what he was hearing, but he had no way to argue against it. The facts lined up to make the assumption that Kaito was right about what Kaede had wanted to talk about, and if that was the case he needed to fix things, and fast. “I’m going to see if she’s still downstairs, I’ll be back up once I’ve sorted all of this out. If you go inside without me, please don’t let Maki know what I did.”

“Not like she’d remember it if I did, but you got it.” Kaito offered a shoulder clasp for good luck but Shuichi shook it off, choosing instead to head straight back to the elevator to get down to the hospital lobby to see if Kaede was still around. He wasn’t upstairs for too long, and yet when he got downstairs there was no sight of her anywhere, not standing where he’d left her or sitting in any of the available seats. She was gone, and he’d pushed her away when she wanted him most, and there was nothing he could do about it except hope that she’d make good on her word that they’d see each other again.

In six weeks Kaede had realized that she had unfinished business to sort out with Shuichi, and he’d ruined that for her in a matter of seconds; it took dashing her hopes for Shuichi himself to realize that he needed the same kind of closure as well, and he didn’t have quite the same position she did to try and make things work. It was out of his hands and squarely in hers once again, and so he went back upstairs and pretended like nothing was wrong, like nothing of note had happened and that he was fine missing that connection with her. But every night for the foreseeable future he lay in bed, lamenting the fact that he could’ve sorted things out if only he’d known the truth of why she was seeking him out—and wherever she was in the world, Kaede was strengthening her promise to her sister’s spirit that she was done with the detective.


	5. Breaking Clouds

Time went on, for better or for worse. The cases that kept finding their way into the detective station were obviously hand-picked by the main office, which meant that they were sent over by Kyoko herself, and Shuichi knew better than to question her judgment on what he could and couldn’t accomplish. After his surprising success at solving the case of the robot thief, it seemed that he could do just about anything, and so he was beginning to break away from domestic disputes and small crimes and getting deeper into longer cases that touched on everything except gruesome murders. Sure, he was called in to investigate scenes of that nature every so often, but he was able to handle most other crimes while Kyoko did the homicides, and that was what worked best for them.

The case that he’d thought had been shelved and left to become cold due to his inability to get to the scene on time ended up having new entries made into its file, and he was able to redeem himself a few times over by going to investigate the new clues that had been discovered. They hadn’t quite gotten to the part where suspects could be named, but after so long of having to watch those related crimes go on it was nice to have a better handle on the situation, and he was glad that he could get back into it after what had happened and work towards solving the whole thing. It was one less thing to rest on his mind, which was something he couldn’t argue against because he had a lot else going on in the realm of his personal life.

At some point, whether he’d asked for it or not, Kokichi had decided that Shuichi wasn’t meant for living on his own, and so he forced them to move in together, so that he could “keep an eye on him.” Shuichi had argued that it wasn’t necessary and that he could take care of himself just fine without the constant supervision, but Kokichi was not backing down from his stance and after getting the support of everyone else they knew, he made it happen. Of course, getting that support wasn’t exactly the hardest thing, when they were all distracted with their own lives and couldn’t devote a lot of time to Shuichi if he needed any sort of help.

That move had been difficult, because it was Shuichi leaving his comfort zone and getting pushed into a place that he wasn’t nearly as comfortable, but because everyone thought it was the best thing to do he couldn’t argue against it. He was allowed to keep his own bed, but the bedroom he had was much smaller than his previous one, and if he was anywhere in the apartment outside of his room he was constantly barraged with the smell of alcohol and sweat, not always because of Kokichi. There were so many strangers in and out of the place at all times, it became exhausting trying to know who was there at any given moment, and Shuichi found himself staying longer hours at work to stay out of that environment.

The longer hours drained on him physically and mentally, because he was getting a lot more done on cases he didn’t necessarily have to investigate himself, but the days of that being possible came trickling down to none after he had a conversation with a one of his employees about them needing to leave their position. “So, uh, y’know that I love working with you and all, but you’ve known what my dream has been this whole time and I…kinda may have been always looking for a job to get myself closer to space.” As Kaito spoke he had a sad smile on his face, trying to make the words have less of a serious air to them, but it wasn’t going to work. “One of the companies working on missile launches offered me a position for starting next year, and I might’ve said yeah, I’ll take it, because they said it’ll get me an in for if they start sending men to space again.”

“Kaito, I…I get it, and thank you for letting me know, but are you sure that chasing that dream is what you should be doing?” Shuichi couldn’t help but be cynical about things, knowing that his best friend had health issues that would make anyone looking for a potential astronaut cringe, but at the same time he wanted to be supportive. “If you’re going to do it, at least I don’t need to worry about getting a replacement hired for you anytime soon, but I would prefer if you would stay.”

“Trust me, I’d love to stay if I could, but this sorta thing doesn’t just happen to ya every day, y’know? Me and Maki Roll have really been talkin’ about it and she thinks it’s what’s best for me, and yeah, she knows that you’re gonna make her take my job because she knows how to do it, so you don’t haveta try dropping that on her.” He exhaled, his smile growing slightly until he saw how tired and unamused Shuichi seemed at the statement. “I know, I know, it’s gonna be super weird not having me and her both here anymore, but at least we’ll still be friends, right? And I’ll keep comin’ by, you know I can’t just stop seein’ my Maki Roll all day every day like that.”

Bringing his hands up to his face to rub at his temples, Shuichi said, “You’ve already moved in with her, Kaito. I don’t think you having to work separate from her for a few hours each day is going to be the end of the world.”

“I’d say you’re right, but I don’t wanna miss any time she ever smiles.”

“Around here? Good luck seeing her smiling ever.” If he was going to quit and work somewhere else within a few months, Shuichi didn’t want Kaito to be intending on coming to impede their important work every moment he could. “Look, you can just focus on working at your missile place and we’ll hold down the fort here, and you and Maki can discuss things over dinner every night. Coming by is not necessary.”

“Well if you say so, guess that’s how it’s gonna be. But don’t worry, I don’t intend on slacking off in my last months before I get the new job!” His wink that he gave was worrisome, but it was low on the totem pole of things that Shuichi had to deal with right then. Now he was going to be losing his best friend at work, while being forced to live with someone who was already trying to wiggle his way into that role, and things didn’t seem like they could get any worse for him.

The hypothetical “worse” came roaring about two years after the fateful trip out of town where he’d been flooded in a hotel with a strange woman, when that exact same strange woman called the station asking for a bit of support. Even though Kaede was famous, Shuichi hadn’t heard anything about her since he’d last encountered her until Maki came into his office, a sticky note in her hand that she slammed down on his desk. “You’ve got a special task to take care of in a few days,” she said, tapping the note a few times to get Shuichi to look at it, not at her face, “and I swear, if this gets you in any sort of trouble like it did last time you did this for her I’m going to strangle you both.”

“Why in the world is Kaede asking for _me_ to drive her somewhere again?” he asked, reading over the note several times to make sure that he hadn’t completely misunderstood what it said. “Better yet, why did you tell her that I’d do it? You could’ve done it, Kokichi could’ve done it, hell, you could’ve asked Himiko to pull herself away from Tenko and Angie for five minutes to have her do it.”

“You’re doing it because maybe you’ll fix things between yourself and her, you lovesick fool. I know how much you regret how you handled things with her, Kokichi’s been very clear in telling us how you cry at night over being lonely.” Even though she sounded serious, the corners of Maki’s mouth were straining themselves to stay turned down and Shuichi knew that she was trying her best to make a joke. However, she had no idea that it would’ve been completely correct if Kokichi _had_ said that sort of thing to her, because he’d spent many nights since that hospital missed connection lamenting the fact that he’d screwed things up with Kaede, and those episodes had only gotten worse in the year since he’d been forced to move in with Kokichi (in part to how the apartment often smelled like how Kaede had in their quick encounter).

He considered telling her to just do it herself, but the serious look that Maki was trying to maintain was peculiar, and Shuichi wanted to dig deeper into why she was insisting on wearing it. But as he was going to ask about that, a quick glance towards his busy calendar reminded him about something else important that was coming up, and he had to do a double-take to make sure that his eyes were not deceiving him, and that the date on the note was really as close to a circled date on the calendar as he thought. “I suppose you also want me to do it to try getting a plus-one to a certain event, hm?” he asked, hoping that he was completely off the mark about his hunch. “I doubt that Kaede would drop whatever she’s doing to do that for me, though.”

“You really are lovesick,” Maki replied, flipping her long hair onto Shuichi’s desk to disrupt some of the stacks of paper on it as she stormed out of the office, going back to the front desk she’d spent the past two years monitoring on top of doing her own investigations. As much as he wanted to follow her out, he had a solid idea as to why she was making him do it, and if it wasn’t for that farfetched reason then it was for something somewhat related.

Slumping down so that he was able to stare at either the note or the calendar, Shuichi heaved a long sigh, running a hand through his days-unwashed hair and wishing that he wasn’t being tasked with something of that level a second time. He really had screwed up when he’d turned down Kaede’s request to talk, but so much time had passed since then that it was most likely that she’d forgotten all about the lowly detective she’d crossed paths with, other than his name and his occupation. It was tempting to rise from the desk and go meet Maki at hers and tell her that he couldn’t do what was being asked of him, and to find someone else to do it, but he knew that in a battle of words Maki would easily wipe the floor with him; there wasn’t really much he could do other than swallow his reservations about the situation and go through with things.

The request weighed on his mind for the rest of the day, long past when everyone had gone home and he’d been asked if he was going to make sure he made it back to his place that night by his overbearing roommate, a mischievous glint in his eyes as he spoke. As much as Shuichi didn’t want to ever have to step foot in that place again, he knew that not going back would only cause problems and so he gave a non-committal noise and hoped that would be the end of things. “C’mon Shumai, I know _all_ about what Maki told you you’re going to have to do,” Kokichi said with a grin forming on his lips, making it impossible to tell if he spoke the truth or not. “Overheard her telling Kaito when he came and picked her up, you’d think she’d be sneakier about sharing news like that.”

“Or maybe she thought that people would have the decency to not listen in on her conversations,” he replied, knowing that Maki would have done all she could to keep things remotely confidential, at least in regards to Kokichi hearing about them. “Just go home, I’ll get there when I get there. I’ve got some work to do before I can leave, anyway.”

Kokichi let out a whine, jutting out his lower lip for a split second before giving up the fight and turning away. “I’ll try to have all the guys out before you get home, so let me know when you’re on your way. And, well, sorry in advance if your room smells weird, we’ve got to have somewhere to test the stink bombs.” He ran out of the building cackling, while Shuichi couldn’t even bring himself to chase him down and question the validity of what he’d just been warned of.

There were much more important things on his mind than the potential presence of another strange odor in the house, anyway. He simply could not stop thinking about the idea of having to transport Kaede again, even though he’d worked out that it was just from wherever it was she was staying in town to the airport, with him as special security to get her safely into the building. They weren’t going to be traveling out of town together, he’d be stuck with her for maybe half an hour at the most, and then their lives would separate once again, this time hopefully for good.

But something about the fact that he may never get to tie up all the loose ends between them didn’t sit right in his heart, and that was why he couldn’t stop thinking about things. He didn’t necessarily want to be part of her life, and he definitely had zero interest in being a tagalong in her world, but he did want to know how she felt about him, especially after their ill-fated previous meeting. She had obviously wanted to say something to him, which he shut down when he realized that she wasn’t in her right mind, but what if she was thinking clearly all along and he’d silenced her for nothing? He spent his life finding how to bring victims of crimes to justice, so it was only fair that he let her get whatever she’d been holding back out into the open.

Once again Shuichi’s eyes tracked towards the calendar, which he’d already written the occasion on, jotting down nothing more than his role as transport, not mentioning who or why. From there, he looked at the other noted date, which fell in such close proximity that it was obvious that Kaede (or whoever had called on her behalf) hadn’t actually requested he drive, but Maki had simply put him in the role anyway. He was going to have to give her a piece of his mind over that, or perhaps he’d let it slide and only address it if anything came of the occasion, but he was certain that the arrangement had her fingerprints all over it.

He ended up not going home that night, instead calling around to see if any friends had an open couch for him to crash on, the reason for his refusal to return home being that he really had no interest in dealing with Kokichi and his nonsense right then. Everyone was aware that giving him that space would merely invite Kokichi into _their_ homes, given that he was incredibly overprotective of Shuichi to the point that it could become borderline stalkerish, but there was one person who’d always open up his home to his friend, no matter the situation. Of course, Shuichi did have to drive himself over, and by the time he was there dinner had long since passed and he was going to have to prepare his own meal if he was going to eat that night, but sleeping on Kaito’s couch was much, much preferred to sleeping in his own bedroom.

Even if the last-minute arrangement ended with him waking up to the sound of his friend leaving for work, and the sight of an underwear-clad Maki walking around like she had no idea Shuichi was right there. He couldn’t bring himself to announce his presence, but when Maki finally noticed him she let out a surprised scream, covering her barely-clothed chest with her arms and loudly threatening him with death if he didn’t get out right then. His defense came out as a bunch of stammers, with her still yelling for him to leave, and so he grabbed the meager belongings he’d brought with him and headed out the door, going straight to the office where he knew he’d never hear the end of what had happened.

The complete silence he got from Maki the whole time she was there that day was telling, but for every word she wasn’t saying to him he was hearing fifty from Kokichi, who kept putting off going out on his assignments to pester his roommate about why he hadn’t come home. “I had somewhere else to be, sorry about that,” Shuichi attempted to say as a bluff, but Kokichi immediately called him on it, laughing and reminding him that he knew what little social life he had. “Please, I really did need to be somewhere else! Just…believe me, please?”

“I’ll believe you’ve got anywhere to be that isn’t here or home when I see it with my own two eyes,” Kokichi replied with a harsh chuckle. “But until then, make sure you’re home at a decent time, you really need to take better care of yourself.”

“As if I need to hear that from you,” he muttered in return, but when Kokichi cocked his head to the side, beckoning for him to repeat himself, he was resigned to the fact that this was a losing battle he’d gotten involved in. “I’ll be home tonight, I promise. And every night after that, until I find somewhere better to go.”

As he brought his head back straight, Kokichi waggled a finger slowly in Shuichi’s direction. “Not so fast, Shumai, you know that if you find anywhere else, I’m going to be the one to make the decision if it’s good enough or not for you! You need to be somewhere where you’ll really be taken care of, after all, and if it’s not with me, it’s got to be somewhere fantastic.”

Rather than continue trying to fight for himself, Shuichi knew he just had to give up and let Kokichi continue living the deluded life he was leading, so he shrugged and went into his office, closing the door and making it seem like he was going to be doing actual work. Eventually he got the courage to leave again, finding the station unmanned except for himself, and he let out a sigh when he saw that he was completely, truly alone once again. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through the rest of this week, let alone the rest of my life,” he admitted to himself, walking up to the front desk to see that Maki had left a note saying she was out on an investigation and would be back later, and that if anyone touched her things she would murder them for it. “Yeah, dealing with her is definitely part of how I don’t think I’m surviving this week, especially since…”

Even though the note expressly forbade what he was going to do, he pushed it aside to see the laminated and taped-down invitation that was front and center on the desk, usually hidden by a keyboard if Maki was doing a lot of computer work, and he stared at it, trying to force a smile as he read over the words he was very familiar with. He was incredibly happy about his friends getting married—really, he was—but it was just an added layer of stress in his life that he was not thrilled with, and it was quickly approaching. That was why it was so strange to him that he’d been arranged to drive Kaede somewhere mere days before the ceremony, given what had happened the last time he had that role; if he missed the wedding he would be in more trouble than that morning’s events had caused for him.

“We’re just going to hope that everything works out exactly like it needs to, that I don’t get killed or lost or something while driving Kaede and that I’m there at the wedding in one piece, or else…” Shuichi swallowed hard, not wanting to think about what else could happen to him, regardless of if he wanted it or not. Focusing on one thing at a time was what he needed to do right then, to not overwhelm himself, and in that moment he needed to think about going home and showering, then he could begin bracing himself for his second stint as a pianist’s personal driver.

* * *

On paper, the task was beyond simple, only needing to pick Kaede up from where she was staying and drive her to the airport located on the outskirts of Kibou, so that she could catch her international flight and get on her way to some sort of show she was putting on. The day before he went to get her, Shuichi had to call a foreign police station, get in contact with the person there who was in charge of protecting Kaede once she was inside their border, and set up a plan for making sure she got where she needed to get, and safely. From there it was only a matter of not hitting traffic, of not coming across surprise weather, and not enduring a mob of reporters and photographers at the airport waiting to get a word and picture with the famous pianist herself, and then checking in with the foreign police hours later.

He knew he could do it, and do it well, but his nerves were almost unmanageable in regards to having to interact with Kaede again. Shuichi set off that morning from the station, having had to hear both Maki and Himiko tell him that he needed to grow up and handle things like an adult (although those words were definitely more Maki’s than Himiko’s), heading downtown to the high-rise hotel that he’d been given the address to. There he sat in his car and waited, memories of the last time he and Kaede had driven together flooding his mind as he watched the front doors for her familiar face to pop up. She’d arranged the time, and yet he was sitting there long after when he’d been told to arrive, and it was only after he’d called the station and told Maki he thought he’d been cancelled on that he saw her leave the building, making a determined beeline for his car and standing at the curb, waiting for him to get out and give her a hand.

 _She’s definitely still acting like a clueless famous person_ , he thought, turning the car off and getting out, only to walk around the car for her to shove her suitcase at him and open her door herself. “I’m capable of doing things on my own, thanks,” she snapped, not even looking towards him, and he was left having to put her suitcase in the trunk before getting back in, her eyes pointed out her window and her headphones already firmly in her ears before he’d even restarted the car.

Much like that ill-fated first drive, they were in their own worlds as they began going down the road, Shuichi trying his best to make up the time he’d spent waiting for her without breaking the law to make it happen. He’d not been told when her flight was departing, nor when she absolutely needed to be at the airport by, and he hoped that them hitting traffic along the way wouldn’t derail things more than they’d already been. Still, when they pulled up on the airport’s departure ramp, Kaede removed one of her headphones and turned to look at Shuichi, her face filled with disgust. “You’re not just dropping me off, are you?” she asked, sounding every bit as annoyed as she looked. “I’m not getting out of your car and taking my suitcase in by myself.”

“It would’ve been nice to have known you expected that much from me,” he replied, keeping his calm and not even looking towards her as he spoke. “I’ll find somewhere to park, but I would’ve appreciated knowing I was doing this beforehand.”

“Well, sorry that my people didn’t tell your people that! Do you _think_ I planned any of this by myself?” Her snappish tone made Shuichi disinterested in continuing to talk to her, and she seemed to think the same about talking to him; within moments she was back to wholly listening to her music and he was able to breathe without feeling like she was staring holes into him.

It took a loop around the airport to be able to properly park without facing any extra fines, and once he found a spot and parked the car he was getting out to retrieve Kaede’s bags, only for her to meet him at the trunk, looking less annoyed but still not thrilled. “I would’ve figured you wouldn’t want to help me do this, given what you just said,” he told her as he opened the trunk, her reaching in towards her bag only to freeze when his words sunk in. She stood up straight, looked over at him, and rolled her eyes as she walked away, him grabbing her bag and following her. “You’re as confusing as ever, Kaede. Glad to see you haven’t changed.”

Her eyes pointed forward, she didn’t seem to notice what he’d said to her and kept walking at a faster pace than he could, not bothering to make sure he was behind her until they were inside the building. The occasional person would look towards her and try to recall where they recognized her from, but no one approached her until she was at the security checkpoint and she stopped, turning around to wait for her luggage. Shuichi was several steps behind her and gotten beaten to her by a curious mother with her children, who were overly excited to talk to the pianist and get her autograph before leaving the airport.

He stopped to let them have their interaction, and found himself watching the Kaede he remembered so clearly from their time together in the waterlogged hotel, how she was pleasant and eager to talk to the people around her. She was laughing, signing shirts and talking about her musical process, and watching it almost made him wish that she wasn’t a different person completely when they were together. If he could spend time with the blissful Kaede in front of him, rather than the brash one he’d had to endure, he’d be much more open to being around her, but that wasn’t his choice to make. Her behavior was entirely her choice, and he was merely a witness to how she acted.

When the family walked away, he was left in full view of Kaede, who smiled at him for a second before approaching him, taking her suitcase into her own hand before bowing her head, calmly saying, “Thanks for bringing me here, Shuichi. It was good to see you again.”

The peacefulness of her speech caught him off-guard, but he was too stunned to say anything before she walked away, ready to get on her flight and leave the country for a while. He was shocked, his breath ripped from his lungs at how she’d been so kind there in her last words, that he found himself winded right outside the airport’s front doors, and he stumbled over to the closest bench, clutching his chest to collect himself. “What in the world was that?” a voice asked him, confusing him further because that was the exact thought he had running through his mind.

Then came a hand touching his shoulder and he looked up to see a sunglasses-wearing woman looking down at him with a scowl on her lips. “You heard me, didn’t you, Detective Saihara? I asked you, what in the world was that?”

“I…I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re looking for me to say,” he replied, seeing the woman grow frustrated at his response and expecting her to lash out at him. “Who are you, anyway? You know who I am, but I don’t seem to recognize you.”

Her response was to sit down next to him, collecting her long blue hair and pulling it over one shoulder so that she could twirl the ends of it as she spoke. “If I tell you who I am, I’ll cause more of a scene than Kaede did inside the airport, people will flock over to us and it’ll be the end of this discussion, and I don’t want that quite yet. Just trust that I’m here for you and only you, and that I mean no harm.”

“Hard to trust that, but…” Shuichi sighed, shrugging and leaning back against the wall behind the bench. “I’ll give it my best shot. So why are you here ‘for me’, as you put it? Certainly I haven’t done anything to deserve being cornered.”

The woman’s twirling intensified for a moment before she explained herself with, “You haven’t, of course. This is all Kaede’s fault, if we’re being quite honest. I watched how she treated you the whole ride over here, only to change her whole tune once she was in the presence of fans.”

“You…watched us?”

“Yes, of course. Kaede had me on the phone with her the entire time, so that I could listen in on how she spoke with you, and she had us following you to keep a visual.” The woman smiled, and Shuichi found himself unable to argue with what she’d said, because it sounded just unreal enough than it was completely plausible. Never mind the fact that Kaede’s friends had been available to bring her to the airport, they’d had some reason for arranging the whole thing in the first place and he waited patiently to hear it. “Kaede has not stopped talking about you with us in the time since you met, and we wanted to give her the chance to admit the truth to you.”

“What truth is there for her to admit?” Shuichi wasn’t stupid, he knew what the woman meant, but he needed to hear it for himself before he would even begin to consider that it was possible. “She hates me, right?”

“It’s actually the opposite, she’s…quite enamored with you. And when given the chance to admit it she treated you horribly, as if she doesn’t want to let you know.” The woman saw the disbelief in Shuichi’s eyes (even if he was expecting this sort of explanation), and she continued with, “Ibuki and I were expecting this, which is why I’m here.”

The name that the woman used caught Shuichi’s ear and he audibly gasped. “As in, Ibuki Mioda, the musician? She’s around here?” The woman nodded, gesturing back with one shoulder towards the parking lot. “Makes sense. But if she’s with you, that makes you—”

He was cut off by the woman putting a finger across his lips. “Don’t say it, I’ve already faced that I can’t hide my identity forever, but give me at least a little bit of time without inciting a mob to meet me.”

“—right, sorry,” he apologized, once her finger was off of his lips, “I guess I got a bit excited about being in the presence of another musician, especially one who’s actually kind to me. Maybe if Kaede was…you know, nicer, I wouldn’t be quite so starstruck.”

“No, I understand your situation, and you’re going to set her straight. I…I have spoken with Ibuki about this many times and we decided that if Kaede didn’t get her act together before now, we’d take it fully into our hands. That meaning, if you’re interested in speaking to her on neutral ground, we’re willing to pay for it.” The hair twirling stopped, and the woman brought her hands together underneath her chin, closing her eyes and beaming at Shuichi, who also understood what that implied and wasn’t going to believe in it quite as easily. “However, we are both heading out on tours here within the next day and, because I know that Kaede is going to be out of the country off and on for a while, time is not exactly on our side here.”

“If I’m going to solve this, you’re expecting me to chase her, huh?” Shuichi’s heart panged at the idea of following Kaede out of the country to sort out everything between them, but he immediately stopped himself from getting too attached to the idea when he remembered what going as soon as possible would entail. “I…can’t do this, my friends are getting married in a few days and if I miss the wedding…”

The woman’s smile only grew larger at the mention of a conflict of interest. “No, you’ll be fine to slip out and chase her down, come back, and attend the wedding without them ever knowing. Besides, wouldn’t you be more interested in your own happy ending than theirs?”

When she laughed, followed by her standing up to take her leave, he hesitated on saying anything else but knew that his silence here would result in no loose ends being tied up. “I’ll have to think about this,” he said, standing up as well now that he had his breath and his mind back in order. “How long do I have to make my decision?”

“We leave tonight, and if you have hopes of being back for that wedding I would assume that you’d want to do the same. If I’ve not heard anything from you in six hours I’m going to revoke the offer, so act quickly.” Brushing all of her hair over her shoulder so it hung lightly curled down her back, she smiled at Shuichi and added, “Before you worry too much, your darling receptionist has my number somewhere at her desk, and you can get it from her to contact me. I’ll be waiting, Detective Saihara. Don’t let yourself or Kaede down.”

A car pulled up beside them, horn blaring, and both of them looked towards it, the woman briskly approaching it while Shuichi stared in minor disbelief at who he saw behind the wheel, the other musician they’d spoken of waiting for her friend to join her. “I won’t let you down, miss Maizono, I promise,” he mumbled under his breath, watching Sayaka get into the car with Ibuki and drive off for their last few hours of work-free life. He walked slowly back to where he’d parked his car, knowing that he had what could be the choice of a lifetime to make in such a short period of time, and every second wasted was another second he could’ve spent getting ready to chase Kaede down, once and for all.

The entire drive back to work was spent with him debating the pros and cons of flying overseas to potentially face rejection from a famous woman who had all but made her true feelings towards him clear time and time again. It felt dangerous to actually consider taking that jump, given the massive time constraints facing him from all sides, but he still had hours to make his final decision and nothing was actually set in stone yet, so he couldn’t force himself to feel anything more than anxiety for what could happen. When he got to the station’s parking lot he sat in his car for a while, working to calm his nerves before going inside to face whoever was there, hoping with all of his might that if it was anyone, it was only Himiko.

As luck would have it, Maki was sitting up at the front desk upon his entry, her eyes immediately locking on his paled face. “Just what do you think you’re doing, coming in here looking like you’re about to pass out over something? All you were supposed to do was drive her to the airport, not fool around with her for an hour longer than you needed to be gone.”

“W-whoa there, Maki! I did just drop her off there, that’s not what’s got me all…oh, not like you actually care about what’s wrong with me, you’re still angry about the other morning.” Bringing up the incident there at her home wasn’t exactly necessary, but getting Maki to remember her disgust about that scene was crucial to getting her off of his back for a little while. Exactly as he figured, she shut down completely, going back to looking at her computer rather than caring about what it was that he was doing, and that gave him the chance to enter his office—and find someone else sitting in his seat, waiting for his arrival with gleeful eyes. “Who said you could be in here, Kokichi? Get out, you’re probably messing with all of my work!”

“I would never do anything like that, Shumai!” Pressing his hands against his cheeks in surprise at the accusation, Kokichi could see that Shuichi meant business by what he said, and yet he didn’t fully follow directions; he may have stood up to leave, but he lingered in the doorway, attempting to remain looking cherubic and innocent. “I was only waiting for you to get back, Maki said you should’ve been back like an hour ago and I really needed to talk to you…”

“Well, talk now, I’m here,” Shuichi replied, sitting down and looking at the mess of casefiles that covered his desk, obscuring every inch of the workspace minus the calendar that he was trying his hardest not to glance towards. “If it’s anything about something irrelevant to work, though, I’m not interested.”

Kokichi’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again after a moment’s pause. “It’s about the apartment. The DICE guys are gonna be over again tonight, just in case you’re out late and wondering what on earth I’ve got going on in there. We’re having an important meeting and we need a kitchen to make it happen.”

“That’s fine, it’s your place after all.” Another reason to just take up the offer that Sayaka had given him and leave the country for the night, although Shuichi wasn’t quite sure why he should be trusting someone who he’d only seen and heard on advertisements before. “I’ll manage, no matter what it is you end up doing with those guys.”

“Thanks, you’re such a great roommate!” Nearly bouncing with joy at the approval, Kokichi left the office quickly, giving Shuichi the chance to lay his head down on his desk and sigh, all of the thoughts about what he’d been thrust into colliding at once. If he went, he’d get to talk to Kaede and sort things out, plus he’d miss whatever nonsense Kokichi was getting up to with his non-violent criminal friends, but he’d also potentially incur the unrelenting wrath of Maki (and Kaito, if he felt strongly enough) if anything dared go wrong. He didn’t exactly feel like what had happened between him and Kaede needed proper closure, but from what he heard it was fairly obvious that it actually did, and if he chose not to pursue her for it then that was his call, not hers.

But could he live with himself, knowing that there was a lead to investigate, if he decided against following her into a foreign country? That was the question that fixed itself most prominently in his mind, and as he lay there on his desk, he couldn’t come up with any other answer than no, no he wouldn’t be able to live with himself in that instance. He was a detective, his life’s calling was to solve mysteries and put things together, and the whole situation with Kaede fell squarely into the category of a mystery to be solved—and that was when he decided that he was going to be about as spontaneous as he could be, playing right into someone else’s premade plans.

First, he had to cover himself and make sure that he wasn’t going to be too terribly missed while he was away, and that meant a call over to the main detective office there in Kibou, leaving a message for Kyoko letting her know she’d need to keep tabs on his station for a little longer than he’d originally told her, because something came up and he was going to be gone sooner. He somewhat wished he would’ve been able to tell her that personally, but he was familiar with everyone she worked with and he knew his message would be delivered whenever possible.

Next, he needed to get Sayaka’s number from Maki’s desk, so that he could tell her that he was taking her up on her offer. The moment he approached the front desk, however, Maki seemed unwilling to speak with him, much less listen to him make any requests. “Stop ignoring me so you know why I’m up here,” he said, sounding somewhat timid but not in the mood to deal with someone being rude for no reason. “I’ll be out of your hair in ten seconds if you’ll just let me talk to you!”

“I’m sorry, I’m not going to do whatever you want me to do for you, since you can’t bother to be a decent human for once in your life.” Maki’s eyes fixated on Shuichi, narrowed into the sternest glare anyone could possibly create without closing their eyes, and when she saw him standing there, unflinching, she didn’t back down from her assertions. “You’re going to blow us off for Kaede, I already know that. But if you even _dare_ ruin this wedding that Kaito and I want to see go perfectly, you’re dead to us, Shuichi Saihara. Absolutely dead.”

“Not even getting into how you already know that’s why I’m here, I’m surprised you weren’t told that there’s a plan to all of this. I won’t ruin anything, I’ll be back right on time.” He cracked a smile, trying to get her glare to soften, but it was to no avail. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world, not when he’s my best friend and you’re…well, you’re my right-hand woman, aren’t you?”

She huffed, looking down and shaking her head at what she’d just heard. “Sure, if that’s what you want to call me. I’ll give you miss Maizono’s number, since obviously you and I both know she’s been the one pulling the strings on this.” While Maki wrote down the number to pass it along, Shuichi could hear her muttering about how it was ridiculous that a famous singer had gotten involved in the situation, and that she was helping try to set someone up with a person that should have been involved herself. He wanted to cut in and tell her that he knew why Kaede wasn’t doing things on her own, but he didn’t want to draw more of Maki’s anger for actively listening in to her private rumblings.

When she handed him the note with Sayaka’s number written on it, he immediately was drawn to the angered message that followed the digits— _Don’t you dare decide you’re staying with Kaede rather than coming home, or I’ll fly there and murder you myself_. “There’s really no reason to worry,” he assured her, laughing awkwardly as he began side-stepping towards his office. “I’ll be gone and home before you know it, I don’t even know why I’d stay with her, it’s not like we’re going to be anything after this. It’s just clearing the air before things get worse, that’s all this is.”

Maki certainly didn’t believe him, and by the time he’d made it back to his office and had dialed in Sayaka’s number into his desk phone, Shuichi didn’t believe himself much either. That phone conversation went by quickly, him not needing to explain why he was calling before Sayaka was telling him what his flight number was, where to check in, and when he needed to be at the airport. The one thing that stuck out to him about their brief call was how well-prepared she was for this, as if she’d been planning it a lot longer than since they’d spoken that morning. Naturally, it made him think that Maki knew more than she was letting on, but when he insinuated that for a second Sayaka made sure to shut it down, clearly stating that her other half in the matter was her perfect intuition, not an actual person of any kind.

But there wasn’t going to be time to dwell on that until he was on his plane, he realized, because now that he knew when he was leaving he could safely say he had just over an hour until he needed to be at the airport, and Sayaka had made zero mention of handling anything overseas for him, just the flights there and back. Thankfully, because of having been arranging police escorts and the like for Kaede’s trip, he knew exactly who to call to try and get himself taken care of, and the moment he was done talking to Sayaka he was calling the station in the city where the flights were landing, hoping to have a quick talk with the person in charge of the whole situation there before he had to leave.

Instead, he got a voice that wasn’t the one he’d spoken to before, happily greeting him with, “Thank you for calling the Ylisstol Police, is this an emergency?” He had to say that no, it wasn’t an emergency in any sense of the word, but he needed to speak with the investigator at the station right away. The man on the other side, on another continent, must have seen the phone number he was talking with and recognized it as being foreign, but his cheerfulness didn’t wane even slightly. “Of course, I can do that for you. Lucky that you called when you did, he just got here not too long ago.”

“He’d told me when he would be around the last time we spoke, I guess I didn’t realize it was so close to when he said he’d arrive. Thank you for transferring me to him, though, I greatly appreciate it.” It was clear that this man was given his job for his personality, because he thanked Shuichi for calling and being level-headed before putting him on hold, presumably to transfer his call over to the investigator.

When the line came back to life, it was a different voice speaking, the one that Shuichi had been expecting at first. “This is Robin speaking, what can I do for you now, Detective Saihara?” the main investigator for the Ylisstol Police said, having been clued in to who was calling him. “If this is about miss Akamatsu, her flight still isn’t landing for quite some time and we still have everything sorted out to take care of her while she’s here, don’t worry so much about her.”

“It’s not about her, not directly, anyway.” He didn’t want to have to explain his whole reason to this poor man, who was already having to work extra to accommodate for Kaede’s arrival in the first place, and so he went in a direction he hoped would spare him from that action. “I was wondering, could you run through the whole plan with me one more time? I thought I’d written it down but if I did, I’ve misplaced the notes and…”

“No worries, it’s not like there’s anything going on right now. Slow night here in Ylisstol, up until she arrives and things get interesting.” When Robin laughed it sounded slightly hollow, but not enough to make it feel forced, and Shuichi was thankful that he was so easy-going about the whole thing. “I’ll be at the airport to pick her up and take her to her hotel room, where she’ll remain until just before check-out tomorrow morning. Then, the police chief is going to pick her up and take her to the festival she’s performing at, because he and his sister are attending it anyway and he offered a spot in his car.”

Shuichi nodded, keeping the phone pressed against his ear as he did. “That sounds like I remembered it being. What time’s check-out, by the way?”

“Curious, are we? It’s at eleven, but she should be picked up before then, so they can start the four-hour drive to the festival before the general traffic does.” Robin paused, before lowering his voice to ask, “Is there a particular reason you’re asking me about this right now, Detective Saihara? You can feel free to be honest with me.”

It was natural that his attempt at being sly with finding details was thwarted as it was, given that the man he was speaking with was one of the best investigators in the world, always mentioned in the same breath as Kyoko (and himself, depending on the situation), but Shuichi didn’t know how to react other than to keep trying to deceive. “I, you know, got a little curious about what was going to happen and couldn’t check my notes, so I had to ask you about it. Nothing big.”

Robin gave a deep breath, saying, “You’re still not being honest, but if you want to insist it was mere curiosity, I’ll pretend like I can’t tell you’re lying and end this call. Is that what you want from me?”

“No, that’s wrong! I don’t want that from you!” The panic of losing his opportunity to set things straight overtook Shuichi and he was almost instantly breaking into a full explanation about what was happening, Robin occasionally chuckling about it all on the other side. By the time he was done speaking, Shuichi felt slightly out of breath and he knew his face was alight from the embarrassment of sharing that sort of news, but he’d gotten his words out and now he could properly explain why he’d called. “So now that you know I need to see Kaede before she gets focused on her concert, is there any way you can help me out and get me where I need to go?”

“I think I might be able to make that work for you. Just tell me when you land here in Ylisstol and I’ll figure out a game plan.”

* * *

Kaede had been on some boring flights in her life, but the one from Kibou to Ylisstol was easily one of the worst simply because it was long, the plane was mostly empty, and she didn’t have much to entertain herself with beyond her music. That meant there was little to distract her mind from dwelling on the way she’d acted before she’d dashed through security at the airport, treating Shuichi with such disdain that he really had to hate her for it. She was just unsure of how to proceed with interacting with him, knowing that she felt something towards him once upon a time and he’d never really left her thoughts, even when she was repenting for the behaviors she’d partaken in because of him.

Even in two years’ time, she hadn’t been able to make amends with her parents over her insistent association with a detective, but they were at least on speaking terms. That didn’t mean that their conversations were much more than them chiding her for her feelings, claiming that she was doing her sister a disservice, and then leaving her to feel sorry for what she’d done. But Kaede had spent a lot of time sitting at her sister’s grave, tracing her fingers over Kotone’s name and apologizing for who she’d fallen for and what she’d done to try having a chance with him, hoping her eternally-young twin would forgive her more easily than their parents had.

She closed her eyes and sighed, leaning forward until the top of her head touched the back of the seat in front of her, before propping her hand underneath her chin. “I just want this all to be over with,” she murmured, visions of Shuichi and his face, his quiet nature and almost invisible presence prominent behind her eyelids. It was hard to stop thinking about him when she was so awkward about talking out her feelings, to the point that she’d chosen to alienate him rather than try to make things work. They were from completely different walks of life, they weren’t meant to understand one another—or, at least, that was what she was trying to convince herself, to dubious success.

After the plane landed and her belongings were all back in her possession, she was in the presence of a man slightly taller than her, with silvery-white hair and a smile that felt welcoming and warm. He introduced himself as Robin, declining to give a last name for reasons that he didn’t want to explain, before giving her the rundown as to what would be happening in her short time in town. She nodded along as he explained she’d be staying alone in one of the nicest hotels in the city, and that she’d be picked up after breakfast by the chief of police himself, so that she didn’t need to worry about arranging any further escorts or anything of the sort. “That all sounds about right,” she said, stifling a yawn even though it was much earlier in the day back home than it was in Ylisstol. “I’m looking forward to trying to sleep and get all of this travel over with.”

“I figured about as much,” he replied, and from there their conversation became about her and her music, a typical topic in her mind, until she abruptly forced the spotlight onto him and he was left explaining that he was an investigator with the police, relatively new in his position but still very good at it. When he started talking about his wife, who he’d gotten married to the previous spring, she wanted to know more about her but he refused to say anything else but that she was lovely, and Kaede couldn’t pester him for more about her.

While they were on their way to her hotel, he tried pointing out some of the more notable areas of town, but due to the dark night sky everything was dim, making it hard for her to see anything. She didn’t mind, even after he told her that the city was beautiful and that she’d be able to see it in the morning from her room, because she wasn’t there to do any sightseeing. This place was a mere one-night stop in the grand scheme of her life, and she couldn’t bring herself to care too much about what it looked like. But if the hotel she was dropped off at was any indication of what the rest of the city was like, it was bound to be as good as Robin made it sound, because the place was much nicer than the hotel she’d been staying in back in Kibou. That was a thought she kept to herself, in case the man would take her complimenting the place as a desire to stay longer, but once she was in her room by herself with the door securely locked, she took the time to at least research the area a bit more, in case it was appealing.

She fell asleep without realizing that she had, waking up on top of the covers in the large bed with the clothes she’d worn on the plane still on, having forgotten to even change into her pajamas. The sun was already beginning to peek its way through the curtains as she sat up, her phone next to her flashing that it needed to be charged, and as she stretched and yawned she looked at the clock in the spacious room, finding that it was much earlier than she usually woke up back home. “Guess that makes sense,” she remarked, running her fingers through her hair to untangle some of the knots in the waves. “Travel does weird things to people, I’m not really any exception.”

Finding her charging cord in her suitcase, Kaede plugged her phone in to give it a good charge before the day’s adventures, setting it on the room’s desk and heading towards the window, looking out onto the city and finding it to be not quite as amazing as Robin had made it sound but still better than some of the places that she’d been. Her first thought was about how it was multiple times better than the town she’d been stuck in with Shuichi, and to remember that in the moment was enough to get her to close the curtains once more and go get in the shower, needing to cleanse herself before she could move on. After her shower, it was a decent enough time to order breakfast to be delivered to her room, and while she waited for that she got on her phone and looked at all of the things that Ylisstol had to offer, in case for some reason she ended up stranded there.

Nothing really struck her fancy, which felt like a good thing, and so she was able to eat her breakfast without any distractions once she had it. The food was delicious, which came as little surprise given the quality of the hotel, but still her mind drifted back to when she would eat with Shuichi there in their hotel room, with their tiny bed and lack of space to do much of anything. She couldn’t keep thinking about him, though, and she knew she needed to distract herself while she waited for the chief of police to come pick her up, so she laid back down and attempted to nap for a little while, figuring that more sleep would clear her mind and get her fully focused on what she was there for.

Her nap was interrupted not long after it started by a knock at her door, enough to get her to jolt awake and go see who it was. She gave the visitor a quick glance through the peephole, but she couldn’t see their face, and when she was about to turn around and go back to the bed they knocked again. This time when she looked, she could see that they had a badge of some sort held up into her line of sight, and while she didn’t recognize the badge she assumed it belonged to the chief she was waiting on, and she opened the door without a second thought.

The silence that filled the air as she stared at a dark-haired, tired-eyed man who was looking back at her with his mouth somewhat hanging open was thick enough that it felt suffocating to her. “S-Shuichi?” she asked, his name feeling strange for her mouth to be saying out loud in a foreign place. “Is that really you?”

“Yeah, it’s me, and I’m so sorry that I followed you like this,” he replied, stepping back to the point that he was pressing himself against the wall behind him. “It wasn’t my idea, I promise you that much, but I went for it anyway and now here I am and I don’t know what I really should do now.”

“You’re here, in Ylisse, in front of me.” She mouthed a few half-words, unable to put a voice to any further thoughts other than the one she’d said. This was the man who kept intruding in on her thoughts, who wouldn’t leave her alone in moments of silence, standing in front of her so far from home.

He noticed that she was trying to speak, and so he stammered, “I already said this wasn’t my idea, didn’t I? I-I don’t know why I went through with it, it was a bad idea and you probably hate me for it and I…probably should just go. Sorry to bother you, Kaede.”

“Hold on, you _followed_ me here and you’re going to just leave like that?” She could see him fidgeting with his pocket as he walked away, probably where he was storing his badge, but when he pulled out his beat-up flip phone she audibly gasped, stepping outside the room just enough that she could reach towards him. “Shuichi, no, don’t go, we need to talk about this!” That got him to stop and turn around, but he just stared at her blankly. “I know, I know, funny that I want to talk to you now, right? But you’re here for a reason, so share it.”

“It doesn’t matter, I have more important things to do.” He waved his phone at her, signaling that what he was referring to was something to do with it, which felt strange to her given that he still had such out-of-date technology in his possession. “I got off the plane to a bunch of missed calls and messages, telling me ‘if you’re late getting home I’ll murder you’ and ‘come on man, couldn’t you chase down a girl some other time?’ and I shouldn’t have ever come here so I’m going to make my friends happy and just…go back.”

“Can’t you at least tell me why you’re here before you leave?”

“So that you can treat me like dirt all over again? No thanks, it was a bad idea letting myself get talked into coming out here, I’m not letting you make decisions for me right now.” Even though he spoke like he was leaving, Shuichi didn’t move, his eyes cast downward until he gave a long sigh and walked back towards Kaede, her unable to leave the doorway unless she wanted to lock her belongings in the room without a way to retrieve them. “What am I even saying right now, if I leave I’m just doing to you what you apparently did to me.”

Her eyebrows raised as she watched him take a position a few steps away from her, putting his phone back in his pocket and lacing his hands together in front of his face, almost as if he was in prayer. “I…like you, Kaede,” he said after a few tense moments of them staring each other down, and her hearing those words made her melt inside. “I don’t know why I like you, or when it hit me that I did, but your friend gave me the opportunity to come tell you and I jumped on it because—”

“Because you wanted to hear me say I like you back, because Sayaka knows that and she wants what’s best for me?” Kaede suggested as an ending to his explanation, not knowing that he would give a small nod in agreement. “Well then you’re in luck, aren’t you? Because I like you too, Shuichi, even though I thought I shouldn’t.”

“So there’s that then, huh? We’ve admitted how we feel, now you go back to your world and I go back to mine, and we end things just like that.” His hands may have been laced, but it was clear that Shuichi was trembling, his fingers shaking as he held them together. “You’re famous, you have all your famous friends and all the press and the concerts and everything in your life that you love, and I’m…just a detective, I’m not anything close to what you are. We may like each other, but it’d never work between us.”

“You flew to a different country to admit you like me, I don’t think you’re going to let it stop right there.” Closing her eyes and seeing the ghostly image of her sister flash before her, giving her an encouraging smile, Kaede found the strength within herself to lay her feelings bare and exposed to Shuichi, as payment for his journey. She invited him into her room, him awkwardly accepting with a few sputters and a blush beginning, and once they were inside everything that she kept so secret from the world became shared between them. Within minutes he knew about her dead sister, about how her family had raised her to blame the law for what had happened, about how she’d felt so much shame for feeling _anything_ towards him. It was all hard to swallow, but seeing her so vulnerable made him realize that she wanted him just as much as he’d been told she did, and she wouldn’t simply divulge this with anyone.

They spent what felt like hours talking, even though Shuichi knew it only felt that way because of how tired he was, and Kaede knew that she was just living in the moment of finally getting to talk things out with him that she was savoring every second. They never got around to labeling what they were, or what they could become, but they did talk a lot about what they wanted out of life, whether the other was in it or not; when another knock came at the door it was almost painful to stop their conversation, but it had to be done. “That’s got to be my ride out of here,” Kaede said, tinges of sadness in her voice as she went to look through the peephole. “I guess I’m riding to this festival with some people who are attending for themselves, which’ll be fun but…”

“Not as fun as if you were riding with me?” Shuichi suggested, not expecting Kaede to light up in response to it. They both laughed, before she finished explaining that it wasn’t going to be fun because riding places with people who knew her music was never quite fun. “I can’t say I get it, but it gives me an understanding for why you like riding places with me.”

She nodded, giving him a grin before working to open the door. “Maybe I’ll get to do it again in the future. I-if you’re okay with it, that is.”

“I might be,” he replied, grinning back at her. He wanted to suggest her ditching the concert and flying home with him, because he knew him ditching his commitments was out of the question, but he knew that it would not be a suggestion well-received. “You’ll have to let me know when you make it back to Kibou, so we can, uh, go out sometime?”

“It sounds like a date!” After that was when she opened the door, and the chief of police in Ylisstol came inside, bringing with him his younger sister who looked between the two people who’d been in the room, clearly wanting an explanation for the unexpected man who was present. Figuring he could leave that up to Kaede, he gave her a quick farewell before ducking out, running down the hall to escape any potential awkwardness that could have been created there in the room. He wasn’t _quite_ fast enough to escape hearing her explain that the person who’d just bolted was her boyfriend—and hearing himself referred to in such a way, in Kaede’s voice, made the entire trip feel worth it.

He wasn’t sure when she’d be getting home, or if they’d get to talk until after she was back, but he was looking forward to when he’d be able to once again speak to her face-to-face, see her long hair and her bright eyes and feel the warmth of the personality she’d been keeping hidden from him. It felt strange knowing that he was waiting on seeing someone he’d never thought he’d truly like again, but stranger things had happened in stranger places.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so there's some things I should say about the ending of this fic.
> 
> 1) in some stages of planning this wasn't the ending, but rather the third of four parts (as a reference to another notably four-parted fic of mine) but I decided against it because I didn't want to get too caught up in details that would, uh, need detailing.
> 
> 2) the entire fic from the start had been a loving reference to my NaNo fic series of the previous four years, so I knew almost right away in planning that I would work those stories into this somehow. of course, I didn't want to refer to any plot points of those fics in this, hence why this takes place before any of those stories do. but if you wanna see why the opening scene of this fic has such an immersive, descriptive moment, or why there's a lot of missed connections, Snowed In!/Summer Days' Nightmares/Season's Snowflakes can explain that (note: they are fics for a different fandom).
> 
> 3) I really wish I could've elaborated more but I didn't wanna have to mark this as a crossover, oops.
> 
> 4) I hope you all enjoyed this!


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